What the North Can Learn from the South Sex Work, Self-Organisation, and Extraterritorial Power in the Global South. A Theoretical Synthesis

Susanne Bleier Wilp

No tysjx_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: This paper develops a theoretical synthesis of the future of sex work in the Global South and argues for an inverted learning gradient. Where an earlier companion paper showed that in the Global North the future of sex work is decided in labour law and in digital and financial infrastructure that the state would have to provide, this paper shows that in the Global South the protective infrastructure exists where sex workers have built it themselves - as peer organisation, cooperative banking, and community health networks, often before and without the state. Drawing on peer-reviewed research and movement scholarship - including Mgbako's fieldwork on African sex worker activism, the literature on the Sonagachi project and the Durbar collective in India, research on the Latin American network RedTraSex, and Agustin's analysis of the 'rescue industry' - the paper makes three claims. First, the degree of self-organisation, not the legal framework, is the strongest predictor of protective capacity in the South. Second, the same extraterritorial US power that regulates the North through platform law operates in the South through funding and visa policy, exemplified by the PEPFAR anti-prostitution pledge, the 2012 visa denials that forced an alternative AIDS conference to Kolkata, and the 2025 dismantling of PEPFAR itself - which strikes hardest at precisely those structures that had made themselves dependent on it. Third, the learning gradient between North and South runs in both directions: the South can learn institutional permanence from the North, the North can learn self-built infrastructure and peer efficiency from the South. South Africa's ongoing decriminalisation process serves as the Southern counterpart to the Belgian experiment. Related work https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/uc57b_v1

Date: 2026-06-15
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:tysjx_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/tysjx_v1

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