Calls for international administrations are still present in contemporary international relations, from the war in the Middle East to the Ukraine. This chapter summarises the main argument developed in the book, notably the necessity to apprehend international administrations through the reality on the ground. This means to pay special attention to the confluence of claims of political authority deployed by international officials and concomitant claims of accountability such practices of authority elicit. Finally, I discuss the various possibilities to strengthen accountability mechanisms for the UN (and for other international organisation).

In the case of Kosovo, the United Nations not only had a mandate to act like an international administration, but its officials also displayed political authority over the territory. As such, the UN displayed authority over legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government. The accountability mechanisms put in place by the UN also pointed the finger at this unorthodox governance arrangement, leading the UN to strip the Ombudsperson institution from its mandate to report on international actors in the territory. After initial years of being under international governance, the Kosovars started rejecting international rule and expressed their willingness to take over the sovereignty of the young country.

In the past four decades, the world has witnessed an explosion of debates, campaigns, and technological innovations, all aimed at eradicating what is now called ‘modern slavery’. From government agencies and humanitarian organizations to tech start-ups and academic institutions, everyone seems to be rallying around the cause, armed with satellite imagery, rescue missions, and helpline posters on airport luggage trolleys (Figure 1.1). The call is urgent, the funding immense, and the sense of mission palpable. Yet beneath this flurry of activity lies a persistent, uncomfortable question: Are these interventions really helping the people they claim to save?

The rhetoric of modern slavery often does little to help those it claims to benefit—a point that critical scholars have long argued.1 What this book offers is an ethnographic exploration of why this is the case, and why, time and again, workers find themselves returning to the very work they were rescued from. Ultimately, this book asks: If freedom is an illusion, and workers return to the work they were rescued from, what does that say about the millions invested in rescue operations worldwide? Rescue is not always wrong; in some cases, it is absolutely necessary. But the design and procedure of the process demand that we ask: Is it working? Is it worth it?

The purpose of this book is singular: to show, through the lived experiences of workers, what happens after rescue. This is not a simple question, nor is there a simple answer. In fact, the complexity of post-rescue life is precisely what makes it so difficult to package it into neat narratives or policy prescriptions.

This chapter argue that the political authority deployed through the early experiments of governance by the League of Nations was actually more limited than generally accounted for. If some of these missions, such as in Danzig and the Saar Basin, were given manyof the ‘trappings of sovereignty’, the actual practices of sovereignty were more limited than generally accounted for. Basing my analysis on archival research done at the Archives of the League of Nations in Geneva – analysing the “hidden transcripts” of League officials – I argue that League of Nations officials were far from being international governors, and authority in most cases resided firmly in specific European capitals.

Some argue that international administrations are contemporary manifestations of a project which began with the League of Nations Mandate System and the United Nations Trusteeship System. This chapter makes the case that these experiments of colonial administration systems are hardly international administrations, with sovereignty practices resting firmly within the European capitals at the time. If some projects envisionned a bigger role for the international organisations at the time, they were in fine defeated by officials brushing aside the idea of having these organisations play a crucial role in colonial governance. This discussion nevertheless sheds a new light on the specificities of contemporary international administration as a project of global governance.

When I first began this research, I thought of rescue as an idea that needed reframing. Too often, it rendered workers passive, erasing their histories as migrants and citizens. My aim was to challenge this erasure, to recover the agency of rescued workers by positioning them not only as survivors of exploitation but also as active agents navigating complex social, economic, and political landscapes.

Yet, as I followed rescued workers through courtrooms, shelters, construction sites, and city streets, it became clear that ‘rescue’ was not a single moment, nor a simple misrepresentation; it was an entire terrain of interaction among workers, NGOs, police, lawyers, and bureaucrats. In this terrain, harm and help were often entangled, and survival depended less on the moment of rescue than on what came after. Over the course of the research, however, the field pulled this project in new directions. The politics of access, the anxieties of representation, and the layered realities of post-rescue life demanded that I treat ‘rescue’ not as a solution to be critiqued, but as a site of power relations in its own right, an arena where the lines between harm and help are constantly negotiated.

Thus, the doctoral project from which this book evolved aimed at reclaiming the agency of rescued workers by framing them as both citizens and migrants, rather than as victims of trafficking. I sought out organizations that recognized the importance of migration in workers’ experiences.

It was another unremarkable day at the NGO office, one of those where the hours drag by in a haze of paperwork and quiet monotony. No courtroom hearings to attend, no site visits to meet workers—just stacks of legal documents to comb through.

Atul and I sat side by side, the silence punctuated by the occasional rustle of paper and the sluggish hum of the overhead fan. The air hung heavy, humid, and stifling, the fan offering little respite.

The quiet was broken when two men entered the office—Amal and Akash. Their exhaustion was etched on their faces, a mix of weariness and resolve. Their feet, cracked and dry from endless hours of toil in the brick kiln, were barely protected by tattered plastic slippers, frayed at the edges.

They wore beige shirts, the fabric clinging to them in a patchwork of dirt and sweat, stained and unwashed for days. Mud from the kiln had settled into the fabric, becoming part of its texture. Their hair was unkempt, sticking up in uneven tufts as if abandoned to its own devices. Their hands, calloused and dry, bore the unmistakable marks of relentless, backbreaking labour.

They stood before us, hesitant yet determined, as though weighing the gravity of the decision that had brought them here. In their silence, their bodies spoke volumes—a testament to the gruelling life they had endured and the hope, however fragile, that they had placed in this visit.

This chapter introduces the main approach developed in International Leviathans through (1) a sociological understanding of sovereignty and (2) the concept of international administration. First, the chapter presents a new take of the debate between Kelsen and Schmitt around sovereignty and presents the sociological understanding of sovereignty by unpacking sovereignty practices. It makes the case for analysing the socio-political or socio-legal struggles happening between competing claims of political authority and accountability. It then discusses and theorises the concept of ‘international administration’, pointing out the limitations of two strands of the literature: the functionalist approach, defining international administrations through the functions they ought to perform as underlined in their mandate, and the normative approach, focusing on self-proclaimed goals and objectives. I posit that sovereignty practices deployed by international officials are social practices which cannot be understood solely through mandates or stated goals – they need to be understood through the reality on the ground, created by claims of political authority deployed by actors and the concomitant claims of accountability these practices elicit.

This chapter presents the central claim of the book, arguing that sovereignty practices emerge at the confluence of struggles – on the one hand, by actors asserting the political authority over a specific territory and, on the other hand, through resistance to this move by actors pursuing accountability and the responsibilisation of sovereign actors. I claim that practices of political authority – expressed through effective rule over territory – are central, constitutive acts of world politics, entailing specific obligations. Broadening the study of sovereignty practices beyond state relations, I argue that understanding how specific actors such as international organisations act as sovereign actors opens up new perspectives on international accountability and obligations in world politics.

There is a story we like to tell about rescue—a story of triumph, of justice served, of victims transformed into citizens, their suffering redeemed by the promise of freedom. It is an uplifting narrative, a denouement that reassures us: the world, though flawed, can be set right. Yet, as the dust settles and the headlines fade, the lives behind these stories continue, marked not by closure but by uncertainty, loss, and the slow, grinding weight of reality— the reality of social structures that constrict individuals’ choices, creating conditions that limit their options and make them work in exploitative conditions in the first place. The moral landscape of these stories also tends to oversimplify the roles of various actors involved. Stories of emancipation rarely delve into the lives of traffickers, some of whom may themselves be impoverished workers, or victims-turned-traffickers, or young people willingly migrating into arduous forms of labour.

Kumud's arrest in 2015 was supposed to be a turning point. In the eyes of the world—non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the media, even myself—it was a victory: a trafficker brought to justice, a symbol of progress. But what did freedom mean for Kumud? Ten years on, the answer is written in debts that never shrink, in the deaths of her daughters who could not be saved, and in a life reduced to selling alcohol on the margins of a city that no longer has a place for her. She waits, not for freedom, but for the end of a legal process that has exiled her from the only home she knew. ‘I am wishing for the case to get over, so I can come back to G. B. Road. I don't have anywhere else to go.’

Chapter 7 turns to the question of diversity from a health perspective, with a focus on scientific uncertainty and regulatory experimentation. This is about the effectiveness of EU intervention, the ability of the EU, as a functionally driven risk regulator, to select the best health intervention, in terms of reduced mortality and morbidity. It investigates how the principle of precaution is used by the Court to grant a certain leeway to the national and the EU legislature. Notably, the principle is applied not only to uncertainty about the existence of health risks, but also to uncertainty about the effects of policy interventions. The chapter then examines two legal devices designed to preserve the regulatory autonomy of Member States: subsidiarity and minimum harmonisation. Through three case studies – tobacco plain packaging, the ban on tobacco for oral use and front-of-pack nutrition labelling – the chapter highlights the contradiction between the need for regulatory diversity and the need for market uniformity, and the resultant tensions with the principles of conferral and subsidiarity.