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1st Int. Transborder Conf. of the Timor Island: Timor %u2013 Science without borderDili, 7-8 May 2025154The Dual Edge of Anti-Trafficking Efforts in East Nusa Tenggara for Migrant RightMario A. OnggangInstitute of Resource of Governance and Social Changes,Jl W.R. Monginsidi 2, Kupang, NTT IndonesiaEmail: marioarnestoonggang@gmail.comAbstractThe presence of the human trafficking agenda in East Nusa Tenggara has been embedded in the circulation of public space from NGOs, government, police, media, and at the level of criticism. State responses to contexts of vulnerability in trafficking discourse have reproduced practices of racial, gender, and age identification in producing new boundaries of bodies and experiences in the mainstream circulation of knowledge. It addresses the tendency to expand the mode of control, legitimize the idea of rescue through the circulation of panic, to bring the notion of fear to the public space to be reproduced. Through an in-depth interview and secondary data collection, the analysis will investigate the strong presence of the state in the era of transformation carried out through commodification and co-optation practices by reflecting on human trafficking cases, as the research will anonymize their identity. The analysis attempts to expose how biopolitics is present to explain the context of mobilities and migrant control and to see a form of liberation through biopolitical efforts in reconceptualizing the self to resist the biopolitical structure of capitalism by redefining the self, a recognition of bodily autonomy.Key Words: biopolitics, migrant control, victimhood, recognition, human trafficking