Is Wildlife Crime a Security Threat? | RosaleenDuffy
Professor Rosaleen Duffy will examine why there is a global shift in policies to tackle the illegal wildlife trade, characterized by a turn towards security-oriented approaches especially since the rises in poaching from 2008.
Responses to poaching and trafficking have focused on enhanced law enforcement, militarization, surveillance and intelligence gathering. There is a renewed sense of urgency to do something to save iconic species from extinction, this was magnified by COVID-19 because wildlife markets were identified as a possible source of the pandemic.
As a result millions of dollars have poured in from donors, governments, philanthropists and corporations to support conservation. Several conservation NGOs are the beneficiaries of these new sources of funding, but so are a raft of new entrants in conservation: private military companies, intelligence services, risk analysts, surveillance technology developers, and drone manufacturers. This lecture will focus on understanding how conservation and security are now shaping each other in complex ways.
Rosaleen Duffy is Professor of International Politics at the University of Sheffield. She is a political ecologist, and her research focuses on the politics of biodiversity conservation, especially wildlife trafficking. She is author of Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade (Yale University Press, 2022), and Nature Crime (Yale University Press, 2010).
Between 2016 and 2020 she was the holder of a EUR 1.8 million European Research Council Advanced award for the BIOSEC Project which focused on wildlife crime and security; she currently runs the £1 million ESRC funded Beastly Business Project on green collar crime and the illegal trade in European wildlife.
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