Regulation by visibility: New forms of global social governance
Nation states, networks and international organisations provide huge amounts of quantified information on all fields of international politics. This is done in an effort to regulate them. Besides the increase of numbers, recently, pictures emerge as visual practices of regulations. Parts of the political effort of the International Labour Organization (ILO) to abolish forced labour build a valuable example. The ILO publishes both estimates on forced labour and Global Reports. In addition, illustrated narrations on how a person is trapped in forced labour are provided at its website. Hence, the decent work discourse on regulating forced labour as a Core Labour Standard (CLS) no longer exclusively draws on texts, but increasingly includes image representations. Thus, the article asks how quantitative knowledge on forced labour is produced and visualised as a mode of regulative governance. In order to understand the content of the ILO’s discursive regulative governance, its strategic alignment and to infer on its possible strengths or weaknesses, discursive and pictographic practices are made accessible.