Kevin Bales

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This article is about the researcher. For the video game developer, see Kevin Bales (programmer).

Dr. Kevin Bales is the world's leading expert on modern slavery and President of Free the Slaves, the US Sister organization of Anti-Slavery International (the world’s oldest human rights organization). He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Roehampton University in London, as well as serving on the Board of Directors of the International Cocoa Initiative.

Bales's 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 expose of modern slavery". A revised edition was published in 2005. This book was based on the first-hand in-depth study of five slave-based "businesses" in five different countries: Thailand (prostitution); Mauritania (water selling); Brazil (charcoal production); India (agriculture); and Pakistan (brick making). His book was the basis for, and he worked on, the film "Slavery: A Global Investigation" made by TrueVision in 2000.

Bales work was informed by the development of globalization theory by Martin Albrow, the theorization of human rights by Darren O'Byrne, and the empirical training he received from Jack Gibbs and Larry DeBord. Some commentators believe that Bales' views on the new slavery were anticipated by contributors to the 1970s mode of production debate, and that his work on debt bondage in India and Pakistan was anticipated by the Marxist Tom Brass. Bales's work won the Premio Viareggio for services to humanity in 2000, and the documentary based on his work, 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. In 2006 the association of British Universities named Bales' work as one of the top "100 world-changing discoveries of the last fifty years".

Bales is a Trustee of Anti-Slavery International and was a consultant to the United Nations Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings. He 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.

Bales 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 gained his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics.

In 1990, Bales teamed with Simon Pell, then head of Arts for Labour in the UK, to form the fundraising and research consultancy Pell and Bales Ltd. Since that time the firm has grown to be the largest company of its type in Britain, and has raised more than $1 billion for medical charities, human rights groups, environmental campaigns, overseas development, and the Labour Party.

Kevin Bales was Visiting Professor of International Studies at the Croft Institute at the University of Mississippi from 2001 to 2005.