Is slavery history or the hidden predicament of our lives? In the last decades, slavery-like forms of oppression and harsh labor exploitation have been documented throughout the world. Under the pressure of a new abolitionist agenda, national governments and supranational entities like the European Union have set up laws that target human traffic, child labor, sexual slavery and a number of other social and economic practices offensive of the rights and dignity of the person. Repeadtly, scholars, activists and policy-makers have remarked that what is unfolding under our eyes is understandable only by bridging, conceptually and through concrete case-studies, the historical and the contemporary. By studying both the legacies of old slavery and contemporary unfreedoms, SWAB fosters the dialogue between past and present, and among regional and conceptual research traditions that have often developed along separate paths.