Kumud's story begins in a small village in Maharashtra, where life was defined by poverty and struggle. She does not remember her exact age, but piecing together timelines—like her arrival at G. B. Road in 1980 and the assassination of Indira Gandhi—suggests she is about 59 now. The pivotal events of her life are often marked by phrases like ‘When Indira1 died …’, a moment she uses to anchor her memories.

Kumud grew up in a family of nine children—five boys and four girls— where the burden of survival left little room for dreams. Her formal education ended in the 3rd grade. Her life took a dramatic turn when a woman from her village approached her father with an offer. ‘With so many daughters, why not entrust the youngest to me? I will take care of her,’ the woman suggested. And so, Kumud's journey to Delhi began.

At just 13, Kumud found herself living in the brothels under the care of this woman, whom she called Didi. Didi ran a brothel, and although Kumud initially played the role of a brothel caretaker/helper—running errands, accompanying sex workers to the hospital, and managing daily operations—she eventually expressed her desire to work on G. B. Road. ‘I have lived in every kotha,’ she says with a mixture of pride and resignation. ‘I followed my Didi everywhere.’

Her stories are a patchwork of raids, arrests, beatings, debts, and moments of laughter. One particular incident in 2015 stands out starkly.

The United Nations Operation in the Congo’s (ONUC) mandate was progressively expanded in the 1960s to include elements of international administration. In this case, like many others, a strict reading of the mandate fails to give a sense of the effective authority displayed by UN officials.The focus of this chapter will be on two specific aspects of the UN presence in the Congo in the early 1960s. First, I will focus on the role played by the UN Secretary-General in the Congo and the UN mission in general during a specific moment, generally referred to as ‘the Constitutional Crisis’. The collapse of the Congolese government enabled the UN to display assertiveness in the country, taking opportunity of this moment of exception. Second, I will analyse the Civilian Operations Programme, an unprecedented effort through which UN technicians controlled segments of the public administration of the country, which is truly interesting from the point of view of authority devoted to the UN. I argue here that the UN displayed sovereignty practices in the Congo, notably through the enterprising Hammarskjöld, who managed to position the UN in position of authority in the country, autonomising itself to a certain degree both from member states and from local Congolese elite.

The mandate of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) doesn’t seem to hint at an international administration in Haiti, yet the setting up of the peace operation opened up a period where it is commonly understood that ‘the international community was no longer working behind the scenes in Haiti to impose a government but rather worked overtly to impose its will’. This chapter will highlight the complex sovereignty arrangement at play in Haiti, focusing on political authority claims by international actors with the repercussions this has for accountability claims from local actors. If public transcripts in Haiti generally focus on the legal trappings of sovereignty of Haiti, with theatrics such as pictures of the Haitian president with counterparts shaking hands in front of their flags in a seemingly egalitarian way, the unequal nature of power relations in Haiti is hardly difficult to detect. Through a combination of the analysis of the leaked Hillary Clinton emails as well as interviews with prominent actors in Haitian politics, I trace situations of exception in Haiti, discussing what this reveals for practices of sovereignty in Haiti. I will be focusing the analysis on the 2010-2011 elections and its aftermaths, especially the attempt to remove René Préval from the presidency following the first round of the presidential elections.

This chapter looks at some of the experiments of international governance by the United Nations typically listed as cases of international administrations (West Irian, Namibia, Cambodia and Eastern Slavonia). These United Nations peace missions have been considered as international administrations by numerous scholars, in the same category with Kosovo and Timor-Leste and sometimes on par with these two experiments in terms of effective authority deployed by international officials. I will be arguing that contra this opinion generally based on the reading of the mandates, international officials have displayed only limited political authority over these territories. Through archival work conducted in the United Nations Archives, revealing in specific instances the hidden transcripts of the time, I will be analysing each of these cases in turn, and adding a few other cases as well including Cyprus, El Salvador, Mozambique, Western Sahara and Somalia.

What happens after the headlines fade? What remains for the people at the centre of the discourse after the NGO press releases are done and rescued workers are photographed? This chapter is about the people whose stories do not get told, the ones who leave the ‘rehabilitation’ centre/process, step outside, and find themselves staring at a life that is just as hard, uncertain, and exploitative as the one they were rescued from. At times, worse.

That decision, quitting rehabilitation, stepping outside of what the system had planned for them, is rarely featured in rescue narratives. It is a complex and incredibly nuanced step that is often erased from the celebratory stories of rescue successes.

There are many such erased stories, some of which we will look into here. Stories of people like Basant, who tried to rebuild his life in his village with the help of an NGO, only to find that none of the promised support arrived, and women like Ratna, whose ‘rescue’ from sex work led to marriage and then to domestic violence. ‘He brought me out of hell and placed me in another hell,’ she said. Her words have stayed with me.

We will also look closely at how people navigate the aftermath of being rescued, returning to old jobs, finding new ones, fighting legal battles that drag on for decades. Even those who stayed in the NGO's orbit, working as peer educators or community workers, often found themselves overworked and underpaid, still stuck in precarious conditions.

Similarly to the experience in Kosovo, the United Nations presence in Timor-Leste also took the form of an international administration. This chapter reviews the three years of governance displayed by the UN over the territory, and notably the growing resistance by the Timorese elite to the governance arrangement. One specific set of practices will be carefully analysed: the international negotiations carried by the UN on behalf of Timor-Leste with Australia over the Timor Gap.

Appendix A.1

The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act 1956 (ITPA):

A Very Brief Overview

The ITPA, heavily influenced by international frameworks like the 1949 United Nations (UN) Convention, was India's way of addressing growing concerns about equating human trafficking with prostitution. The law aimed to protect women and children by criminalizing activities required for sex work.

But here is where things became complicated. As researchers have argued, the ITPA's approach—centred on eradicating prostitution—came with serious consequences. Instead of protecting sex workers, it often stripped them of agency, assuming all sex work to be inherently exploitative, whether voluntary or coerced. This assumption led to state-led interventions like forced rescue operations and mandatory detention in so-called corrective homes. Ironically, many sex workers returned to their profession even after being ‘rescued’.

And then there is the issue of rehabilitation. Although the ITPA was framed as a protective law, its focus on corrective homes perpetuated stigma and failed to acknowledge the autonomy of sex workers. As Kotiswaran points out, the promise of rehabilitation often became a tool of control rather than empowerment. Adding another layer to this debate, international donor-driven interventions—particularly those targeting HIV/AIDS—started shaping the narrative. A pivotal moment came in 1986 when India reported its first HIV/ AIDS case, involving a sex worker in Madras. Suddenly, the focus shifted from broader humanitarian concerns about trafficking to regulating sex work in the name of public health.

It was my first day with the NGO, and my primary contact there, Atul, was known for his efforts to rescue workers and file cases under the BLSAA. He had graciously allowed me to tag along, to observe and document the postrescue journey of 18 migrant construction workers in Noida. These workers had been evicted/escaped (based on different claims) from their site after protesting months of unpaid wages. Thrown out with their belongings, they lived under flyovers, surviving on food from passers-by and temples, until someone directed them to Atul. Atul, in turn, had contacted the district administration, seeking to have them classified as bonded labourers—a designation that could unlock legal protections and compensation under BLSAA. Ten days of back-and-forth negotiations later, the district labour office agreed that the workers meet at the construction site (Figure 2.1), where officials would hear all sides and make a decision.

Atul tasked me with ensuring that the workers reached the site. It was a sweltering afternoon when I found myself accompanying 18 workers and an NGO lawyer to the site, a journey that took nearly an hour and a half. We switched from a crowded bus to autos and then trudged the final stretch on foot, the heat relentless and unforgiving. The sun bore down with a merciless intensity that seemed to sap our energy with every step.

When we finally arrived, the workers sat on the ground, their faces shadowed with fatigue and resignation. Shoulders slumped, movements slow, as though the weight of the day—and their circumstances—had drained them entirely.

In the early 1980s, some social workers came across a community of over 3,000 migrant workers (mostly Dalit) toiling away in ‘inhuman and intolerable conditions’1 in stone quarries in Haryana, India. The labourers were from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh. The social workers wrote a letter to the Supreme Court of India, arguing that many of the labourers were working in bonded labour conditions and should be treated as such under the BLSAA. The court elevated the letter to the status of a petition, constituting a public interest litigation (PIL).

This pivotal moment culminated in a 90-page judgment in 1983, acknowledging the labourers as bonded labourers, which now stands as a landmark judgment, the Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India and Others, in the ongoing fight against bonded labour in India. Swift judicial action was taken to address the exploitative working and living conditions of the labourers, in an effort to safeguard their fundamental rights under Article 23 of the Constitution of India. The court asserted that ‘whenever it is shown that a labourer is made to provide forced labour, the Court would raise a presumption that he is required to do so in consideration of an advance or other economic consideration received by him and he is therefore a bonded labourer’. Consequently, the state of Haryana and the central government were mandated to release and rehabilitate the labourers.

However, the state of Haryana contested the characterization of these individuals as bonded labourers.