The role of conflict resolution in a major urban partnership to fight human trafficking

• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/crq.21247
• Author: Ami C. Carpenter
• Published date: 01 June 2019

RESEARCH ARTICLE

The role of conflict resolution in a major urban

partnership to fight human trafficking

Ami C. Carpenter

Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San

Diego, San Diego, California

Correspondence

Ami C. Carpenter, Kroc School of Peace Studies,

University of San Diego, 5998 Alcala Park, San

Diego, CA 92108.

Email: acarpenter@sandiego.edu

This article takes a singular case study to explore the for-

mation, structure, and impact of a complex urban partner-

ship to address sex trafficking in the San Diego-Tijuana

border region. It explains the relationship between the

partnership's structure and subsequent policy outcomes,

and argues the two are linked through a staged network

formation process in which conflict resolution practices

were central in overcoming institutional and cultural bar-

riers to collaborative governance. It contains portable

insights about how leadership and decision-making

unfolds and institutionalizes in situations characterized by

complex forms of violence that nobody is singularly

“responsible”for handling.

1|INTRODUCTION

Over the past 20 years, human trafficking has gained greater attention and empirical study both

nationally in the United States, and globally. While the study of conflict resolution has not entirely

overlooked human trafficking and other organized criminal enterprises (Davis, 2012), the field is

more accustomed to dealing with other forms of conflict. Yet the field's critical theorists argue that

the complexity of contemporary social conflict calls for new methods of conflict resolution and trans-

formation. These include civil wars in Yemen or Syria, “cartel”or “drug”wars in Mexico, and “gang

wars”throughout much of Central and South America. Even in more traditional contexts—civil wars,

for example—the concept of definable “sides”is increasingly complex, the overlap between criminal

and political motivations are often significant, and lines are often blurred between victims and

victimizers.

Conflict analysis of human trafficking concludes that efforts to counter trafficking must include

not only criminal justice and protection responses, but a range of preventive peacebuilding responses

as well. Yet little attention has been paid to how communities organize holistic, effective responses

to trafficking that involve a requisite diversity of stakeholders, including law enforcement, educators,

service providers, faith-based organizations, community activists, and academics. A great wealth of

Received: 9 March 2018 Revised: 12 February 2019 Accepted: 13 February 2019

DOI: 10.1002/crq.21247

© 2019 Association for Conflict Resolution and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Conflict Resolution Quarterly. 2019;36:311–327. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/crq 311

knowledge from other fields can be brought to bear on this topic, from literatures on resilience, con-

flict analysis and resolution, organizational change management, and social network theory. Elabo-

rated further on, these literatures together produce four assertions upon which this article is based.

First, human trafficking is one manifestation of structural factors—poverty, inequality, sexism,

and racism—that give rise to other forms of community violence. These structural injustices are

rooted in neoliberal economic policies and forces of globalization that are often beyond the reach of

local communities to influence. Yet effective responses to community violence can be taken at the

subsystem level (Dugan, 1996). Communities can effectively confront entrenched criminal networks

by mirroring resilience characteristics of trafficking networks themselves.

This second assertion—that communities can strengthen their resilience to entrenched trafficking

networks by structuring their efforts in the same way—comes from the growing literature on commu-

nity resilience (Zolli & Healey, 2012). In San Diego, over one hundred gangs are engaged in traffick-

ing people, and they often work together in a broad network that crosses traditional gang rivalries,

and extends along the Western coastal and inland areas of the United States (Carpenter & Gates,

2016). The challenge for cities and other communities is to create an equally complex partnership by

organizing diverse professional groups into a larger, distributed network. Only in this way can the full

range of resources be brought to bear on trafficking's complex, multilayered causes and dynamics.

Third, confronting human trafficking is a complex project for which classic forms of hierarchical,

centralized, or top-down governance are not effective. Nor can anyone force cooperation between

diverse sectors each of whom have something positive to contribute and have relatively equal power

vis-à-vis one another. Instead, a large literature argues that collaborative governance is central to the

formation and performance of partnerships in which public, private, nonprofit, and community sec-

tors work together. However, the formation of partnerships to counter human trafficking is often sty-

mied by leadership and worldview conflicts between professional communities, both of which stem

from incongruent understandings about what causes human trafficking and what approaches will

yield the best results.

In a large part, these conflicts emerge between members of law enforcement agencies whose per-

spective is informed by a criminal justice lens, and members of other professional communities with

very different practices and values. The fourth assertion is that effective partnerships are those able to

manage ambiguity, generate motivation, and overcome resistance to change, build trust, and build

cooperative interdependence across power hierarchies. These processes require effective conflict res-

olution and knowledge fusion (shared interpretation) in order to have meaningful impacts.

This article is based on the author's participation for 8 years in an urban partnership to interrupt

and prevent trafficking—the San Diego County Human and Child Sex Trafficking Advisory Council

(hereafter the Advisory Council). The Advisory Council is grounded broadly in a community resil-

ience approach that “starts with connecting with other partners and networks or coalitions, and defin-

ing a plan for strengthening the community”(Chandra et al., 2013, p. 21). The Advisory Council has

more or less successfully reorganized existing networks of law enforcement, educators, service pro-

viders, faith-based organizations, community activists, and academics into a larger network-of-net-

works. Significant successes (discussed further on) have involved incrementally widening projects of

cooperation between network partners. The Advisory Council has been recognized domestically and

internationally as a highly effective partnership for addressing human trafficking.

In the following pages, I explore the formation, structure, and impact of the Advisory Council as

a feature of community resilience to the well-entrenched criminal networks that operate throughout

the San Diego–Tijuana border region. First, I will explain that the story of the Advisory Council is a

story about peacebuilding at the subsystem level (Dugan, 1996), but one which involves networks of

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