This chapter examines the gendered structure and impact of sanctions on the DPRK, or North Korea, with particular attention to the sanctions imposed by the UNSC amidst the unresolved tensions surrounding Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile program. The gendered impact of sanctions on North Korea has largely been neglected in the literature, although the country has been subject to sanctions for most of its existence, and the UNSC resolutions passed from 2017 onwards constitute one of the most stringent international sanctions regimes in the world today. While sanctions aim to pressure the North Korean government, they disproportionately burden women, particularly in employment, caregiving, and informal market participation. Rather than focusing on the efficacy or legality of sanctions as in most sanctions literature, we argue that the North Korean case demonstrates the unrecognized ways in which sanctions can have ripple effects far beyond their intended “target” – unrecognized precisely because debates about sanctions as a form of statecraft often preclude an examination of the kind of gendered violence that sanctions impose on daily life.

In this chapter, we discuss Jewish, Christian, and Muslim attempts to reduce the scope of slavery that fall short of abolition. For example, religious groups at various times have restricted slavery by making it more difficult to turn a free person into a slave, and by making it more difficult to sell slaves, and by placing limits on who could hold a slave of a certain category. In this chapter we also evaluate the influence of Christianity on the waning of slavery in medieval Europe, and examine the Catholic response to enslavement in the New World.

In this chapter we examine the justification of slavery by religious groups and by individuals on religious grounds. Starting with a survey of Christian proslavery thought in North America, we distinguish and analyze several types of religious arguments for the moral permissibility of slavery. We then discuss the justification of slavery in Hinduism and Buddhism, including the way in which the doctrine of karma and the caste system have facilitated slavery. We proceed to examine the justification of slavery within Judaism, early and medieval Christianity, and Islam. Finally, we critically analyze religious proslavery arguments, contending that much religious justification of slavery was largely the product of rationalization and motivated reasoning.

In this chapter, we provide context for Part II’s examination of religion and contemporary slavery, by sketching the evolution of slavery and the development of antislavery efforts from after the American Civil War until the late twentieth century. We discuss the antislavery movement focused on the Belgian Congo around the turn of the twentieth century, the League of Nations 1926 Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery, the persistence of slavery in various European colonies, and the use of state-organized slave labor by Axis powers during World War II.

In this chapter we examine the connection between religion and abolition. After discussing early antislavery voices, such as the Essenes and St. Gregory of Nyssa, we recount in detail the growing Christian rejection of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Attention is given to the arguments and action of early Quaker abolitionists, including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, to Anglicans like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, and to antislavery activism in North America leading up to the American Civil War. We then provide a theoretical evaluation of the role of Christianity in the nineteenth-century rejection of slavery. The chapter closes with an exposition of Islamic abolitionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on Ahmad Bey, Rashid Rida, Mohsen Kadivar, and Bernard Freamon.

Beginning with a careful analysis of St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, we examine attempts to ameliorate slavery by religious groups and by individuals inspired by their religious beliefs – focusing on Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, with some attention to Buddhism and Hinduism. To “ameliorate slavery” is to make the lives of slaves better in some way, but without challenging the legitimacy of slavery as such. We organize the many ways in which religious groups have tended to ameliorate slavery into four categories. First, various religions have exhorted their adherents to treat slaves well. Second, religious leaders have given their flocks moral exhortation to free and ransom slaves. Third, religious groups have promoted changes in the law of slavery that tended to make life better for some slaves. And fourth, the three major monotheisms have espoused doctrines of human spiritual equality and shared eternal destiny which provided slaveholders with additional reasons to adopt a more humane attitude to slaves and which may have given believing slaves a greater sense of worth, purpose, and hope for the future.

From the beginning of human history, slavery and religion have been linked. Slaves have been forced to serve religious hierarchies. Religious doctrine has often set out who might be enslaved and justified that slavery. Yet religious ideas and motivations also led people of faith to restrict the scope of slavery and ease the lives of slaves in ages past, and religious groups were at the center of the successful abolitionist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unknown to many, the tangled and varied connections between religion and slavery continue today. Religious groups play a vital role in the fight against contemporary slavery, yet religious identity is still being used to facilitate enslavement, in several ways and in many countries. In this Introduction, we sketch the structure of our book and then treat three preliminary questions: How bad was ancient slavery? How bad is modern slavery? And what do we mean by “slavery”?