The Banality of Good

"The Banality of Good focuses on the contemporary counter-human trafficking efforts of the Japanese government under the umbrella of the United Nations' Trafficking Protocol, a global campaign designed to assist victims of human trafficking. Examining Japan's counter-human trafficking program, known as the Action Plan, Lieba Faier uses Japan as a case study through which she argues against globalization in response to local issues, stating that programs like the Trafficking Protocol erase the history, political and economic inequality, and cultural differences of the very people they are designed to aid. Borrowing from Hannah Arendt's idea of the "banality of evil" as drawn from the trial of leading Nazi Adolf Eichmann, Faier coins the "banality of good," using the phrase to refer to reality of Japan and the UN's response to human trafficking that privileges bureaucracy and compliance over the needs of victims, often resulting in a lower quality of life, repatriation, and even criminalization of human trafficking survivors. The book's early address how this ethically "good" counter-human trafficking project became institutionalized within the United Nations and Japan, resulting in its banality, while later chapters focus on Faier's ethnographic explorations of the work of the Trafficking Protocol and Action Plan as it plays out day-to-day, highlighting the struggles faced by caseworkers attempting to provide direct assistance to those who have been trafficked in Japan"--