We are home to the world's leading modern slavery experts and have built a large-scale research platform for ending slavery.
We tackle a key challenge of global development and one of the great human rights issues of our time. The largest group of modern slavery scholars in the world, and home to the world’s leading academic experts on modern slavery, the Rights Lab is underpinning antislavery with an advanced research agenda.
Our team is answering six big questions:
1. How many people are enslaved in the world and where are they?
2. Why does slavery persist and what creates resilience against slavery?
3. What is safe and effective support for survivors of modern slavery?
4. How can we close the implementation gap, between principle and practice?
5. What are the impacts of slavery on our economies and how can businesses tackle slavery?
6. What works to end slavery and what is the Freedom Dividend for our world when slavery ends?
Each question forms a central Rights Lab programme, led by our five Associate Directors and staffed by senior and early-career scholars who work closely with our NGO, business, and policy partners around the world.
Find out more about our five programmes:
- Measurement and Geographies
- Communities and Society
- Health and Wellbeing
- Law and Policy
- Business and Economies
As a Lab, we are an experimental space. We bring diverse methods to bear on a critical problem, without adherence to disciplinary boundaries. We leverage the theories and methods from political science, law, sociology, history, geospatial science, computer science, corpus linguistics, and mental health, among numerous other disciplines, and mix methods, data, tools, and techniques into the best combination for solving a real-world problem.