Kevin Bales is President of Free the Slaves, the US sister organization of Anti-Slavery International (the world’s oldest human rights organization), and Professor of Sociology at Roehampton University in London.
He also serves on the Board of Directors of the International Cocoa Initiative. His book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, published in 1999, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and has now been published in ten other languages. Archbishop Desmond Tutu called it “a well researched, scholarly and deeply disturbing exposé of modern slavery”. A revised edition was published in 2005. In 2006, his work was named one of the top “100 World-Changing Discoveries” by the association of British universities.
The Italian edition of Disposable People won the Premio Viareggio for services to humanity in 2000, and the documentary based on his work, which he co-wrote, Slavery: A Global Investigation, won the Peabody Award for 2000 and two Emmy Awards in 2002. He was awarded the Laura Smith Davenport Human Rights Award in 2005; the Judith Sargeant Murray Award for Human Rights in 2004; and the Human Rights Award of the University of Alberta in 2003. He is a Trustee of Anti-Slavery International and was a consultant to the United Nations Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings. Bales has been invited to advise the US, British, Irish, Norwegian, and Nepali governments, as well as the governments of the Economic Community of West African States, on the formulation of policy on slavery and human trafficking. He recently edited an Anti-Human Trafficking Toolkit for the United Nations, and published, with the Human Rights Center at Berkeley, a report on forced labor in the USA, and completed a two-year study of human trafficking into the US for the National Institute of Justice. He is working with the chocolate industry to remove child and slave labor from the product chain, and writing on contemporary slavery (see for example his feature article in the April 2002 Scientific American). His book Understanding Global Slavery was published in September 2005. He is the author of New Slavery: A Reference Handbook (revised 2nd ed. 2005). His book Ending Slavery, a roadmap for the global eradication of slavery, was published in September 2007. He is currently editing a collection of modern slave narratives, and co-writing a book on slavery in the United States today with Ron Soodalter. He gained his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics.