The trafficking of human beings for harvesting organs, sex and labor slavery, forced military conscription, begging, and adoptions presents a formidable challenge in the arena of global justice. The primary aim of this new work by Louise Shelley is to show that human trafficking affects not only its victims but society as a whole, and that the international community should be concerned about trafficking for pragmatic reasons of shared security, as well as the more obvious moral, ethical, and legal issues involved. Trafficking, Shelley points out, empowers corrupt border officials, the traffickers themselves, and transnational organized criminal groups (including terrorists), which can in turn lead to the loss of control of state borders. Human trafficking also poses a significant threat to world health security, given that trafficking is associated with the spread of a variety of diseases, notably AIDS and tuberculosis.

Shelley also offers normative reasons to prioritize the eradication of human trafficking, arguing that since trafficking requires unjustified coercion, it promotes authoritarianism and threatens democratic norms. Of course, trafficking also causes major human rights violations, given the physical and sexual violence associated with exploitive labor; and it has a particularly deleterious effect on women's rights and gender equality.

In addition, Shelley offers an analysis of the aggravating effects that globalization has had in perpetuating and escalating modern slavery. Though traditional conditions of poverty and the low social status of women, children, and stateless persons are at the root of the problem, such global developments as intensified disproportionate economic growth (which has left the global poor especially vulnerable to the rise in demand for exploitable labor) and easy access to low-cost transportation have compounded the problem. After analyzing the region-by-region business models of human trafficking organizations, Shelley advocates for a joint project involving consumers, the business world, educational institutions, civil society, governments, and multilateral organizations to bring an end to human trafficking.