ethnic and religious pollutants” (284). As doctors discussed the role of inheritance and environment in shaping patterns of criminality, abolitionist concepts vis-à-vis prostitution came to dominate medical discourse. The exigencies of the First World War, however, rede- ﬁned commercial sex work. Prostitution became a survival strategy for an ever-larger number of women. Newly independent Poland, as a result, had to deal with a serious social issue. A scientiﬁc approach to commercial sex work overtook a moralizing one. An inclusive main- stream discourse was created in which prostitutes – regardless of their ethnic or social origin – started to be perceived as a part of the national body. This was reﬂected in new legislation passed in 1919 which gave control over the regulation of prostitutes from police to medical professionals. However, this legislation was the ﬁrst and only step towards reforms in the commercial sex industry. Because of constant economic and political crises in the Second Polish Republic, further attempts to change prostitution-related law failed. Through analysis of prostitution in partitioned Poland, Stauter-Halsted explores gender, modernization and nation-building, immigration, citizenship, and the increasing inﬂuence of the expert in public policy. This masterfully crafted study transcends the traditional frame- work of political history by focusing on a much-maligned and long-ignored social group. Considering the paucity of works on gender in the study of Eastern and Central Europe, Stauter-Halsted’s research ﬁlls an important void. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Polish history, but also to those interested more broadly in the history of modern Europe and the social transformations unleashed by modernity. Oksana Vynnyk University of Alberta vynnyk@ualberta.ca © 2016 Oksana Vynnyk http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2016.1238628 Economies of violence: transnational feminism, postsocialism, and the politics of sex traﬃcking, by Jennifer Suchland, Durham NC, Duke University Press, 2015, 260 pp., US$24.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-822-35961-6 Today, human traﬃcking is predominantly framed as a form of violence against women that is committed by organized criminal syndicates frequently hailing from the postsocialist region. But, as Jennifer Suchland shows in her fascinating genealogy of the discourse surrounding human traﬃcking, this framing was neither inevitable nor the only one possible. Human traﬃcking is also caused by structural changes in the global economy, including the increase in informal labour practices, ﬂexible working arrangements, and restrictive migration policies, all of which contribute to placing millions of people around the world in situations of precarious labour. Drawing on documentary evidence of discussions and debates on human traﬃcking at the national and international level, and a case study of Russia, Suchland tells a convincing story about how these frames arose, and what policy responses they enabled and foreclosed. She also traces the geopolitical inﬂuences on how this discourse evolved and brings an important, and until now undertheorized, focus to the postsocialist region’s role in this process. The region of Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union is critically important to Suchland’s story about framing, and in this regard timing matters. Socialism was collapsing precisely at the moment when the consensus about women’s rights was forming in which traﬃcking was framed as a form of violence against women. In 1995, these concepts were enshrined in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. The women’s groups from CANADIAN SLAVONIC PAPERS/REVUE CANADIENNE DES SLAVISTES 425