On Well-Intentioned Harm: The Redistribution of Vulnerability

Last week’s classes had me reflecting on a pattern across seemingly unrelated domains - immigration policy, corporate sustainability, anti-trafficking laws - where interventions designed to help actually intensify the vulnerability of those they claim to protect.

I don’t think these are accidents. I think they’re features of our society and system.

The Pattern

Sarah Horton’s 2016 paper on governing immigration through criminalisation traces how tighter enforcement hasn’t reduced irregularity, it’s just changed its form. What it has created is a black market for forged identification documents and, more insidiously, a new form of control: denounce-ability. Employers now have a weapon they can hold over workers. The regulations didn’t solve the “problem” of irregular migration; they redistributed power and risk onto people who were already vulnerable.

Pardis Mahdavi’s work with female migrants in the UAE follows similar logic. International law prohibits human trafficking, as of course it should. In this context, female migrants in the Gulf turn to the informal economy in search of higher wages and increased autonomy. The regulatory response has constrained women’s mobility and agency in ways that ironically create the conditions for more vulnerability and precarity.

And then there’s Dinah Rajak’s work showing how corporate sustainability programs provide a fig leaf for ongoing extraction: the “solution” becomes cover that permits continued harm.

The Dilemma

So here’s where I’m stuck. My first instinct is that we need to be far more critical of seemingly well-intentioned solutions. We need to ask: do these interventions actually help the most vulnerable, or do they simply shift risk and vulnerability onto people who are already surviving in the most precarious positions in these systems? I’m loathe to describe these consequences as unintentional or unforeseen, because I don’t believe that’s true, but I don’t believe the consequences for these regulatory frameworks are openly and frankly discussed because that’s how power operates and maintains itself.

But there’s also a danger in that analysis. These problems are genuinely complex and deeply intertwined. I’m not sure it’s even possible to generate solutions that don’t have first, second or third order effects that are undesirable. Most proposed solutions don’t fundamentally change the systems that generated these problems in the first place, which means there aren’t really any “good” solutions within the existing logic. And recognising that risks paralysis. If every intervention just redistributes harm, what do we do?

A Way Forward (Maybe)

I’m starting to think the point isn’t to find perfect solutions, but to recognise how the demand for immediate, implementable answers often forecloses more fundamental questions about whose interests these systems actually serve.

Look at the pattern again: who gains legibility and legitimacy from these “solutions”? States, corporations, employers. Who loses agency, mobility, autonomy? Migrants, workers, communities facing extraction. What structural relationships remain unchanged? Capital-labour relations, borders, the logic of extraction itself.

This doesn’t mean doing nothing. But it might mean:

• Being deeply suspicious of solutions that enhance surveillance or control over vulnerable populations, even (especially) when framed as protection or security;
• Centring the perspectives and choices of those supposedly being “helped”, like sex workers defining their own needs rather than being “rescued” by frameworks that constrain their mobility;
• Demanding accountability for the harms created by interventions, not just judging the goodness of intentions;
• Supporting grassroots organising and collective power-building rather than top-down technocratic fixes.

These aren't just analytical questions but questions about power, and answering them requires political organising, not just better analysis. Maybe the responsibility isn’t to propose better policy tweaks, but to ask harder questions about whose interests are preserved when problems get “solved” without addressing root causes.

What I’m Sitting With

I don’t have this figured out. That’s kind of the point of these fieldnotes: to sit with the contradictions, to trace the patterns even when they’re uncomfortable, to refuse easy answers while still insisting something different must be possible.

What strikes me most is how these well-intentioned harms operate across such different domains. It’s not just immigration, not just environmental policy, not just labour regulation. It’s a pattern in how power works through institutions that claim to protect while actually managing, containing, perpetuating and obscuring the problems they create.

Once again, I’m left with more questions than conclusions: How do we critique harmful “solutions” without falling into cynicism or paralysis? How do we support the agency of those most affected without imposing our own frameworks of what liberation should look like? How do we hold space for the complexity without using that complexity as an excuse for inaction?

Still thinking.