In 2018, the Tibet Autonomous Region began resettling pastoralists from high-altitude areas to newly built settlements in distant, lower-altitude farming locations under the “extremely high-altitude ecological resettlement” programme, with a stated dual purpose of environmental protection and improving pastoralist well-being. The programme is said to be based on a principle of “government guidance and voluntary participation.” However, despite its stated “voluntary” nature, the government reports a 100 per cent rate of agreement to participate. After examining the ecological rationales for resettlement and pastoralists’ reluctance to move owing to livelihood concerns and attachment to homeland, the article examines how consent is achieved. Based on official documents and reports as well as semi-structured interviews with officials and pastoralists in Nagchu Municipality, the core target area for the programme, the article identifies a three-step “thought-work” oriented process – beginning with an initial survey, followed by group incentives and warnings and then individual incentives and warnings – which is deployed until pastoralists sign a resettlement agreement. The process illustrates the dialectical relationship between coercion and consent.

Conducting experiments on humans may subject them to abuse and exploitation. The international community has developed principles, rules and norms that provide for safeguards against exploitative human experimentation. Recruiting a person by illegal means for illicit purposes has been criminalized as human trafficking. This article attempts, for the first time, to address human experimentation as a form of human trafficking. The article advocates for an expansive definition of the concept of human trafficking to include not only sex or labor but also medical or scientific tests that are conducted in violation of the law, also arguing that the international medical ethical principles, rules and norms may be more appropriately analyzed by using the three basic elements of a case of human trafficking, namely: (a) absence of consent; (b) abuse of a position of vulnerability; and (c) exploitation.