Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade by Rosaleen Duffy

Abstract

Rosaleen Duffy became a prominent student and critic of international wildlife conservation when she published Killing for Conservation (Duffy 2000), a wonderfully detailed study of wildlife policy in Zimbabwe. It is a work that still ranks—along with Politicians and Poachers (Gibson 1999), which also dealt with Zambia and Kenya—as a landmark contribution to our understanding of how national interests in African wildlife become entangled with and are reshaped by, and to some extent in turn reshape, the interests of a wide range of other actors who claim a legitimate interest in the fate of African wildlife. These actors include notably, but not exclusively, international conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The key analytical assumption both Duffy and Gibson made in those early books was that the fate of African wildlife did, and should, depend first and foremost on the domestic politics of the African countries responsible after independence for managing the wildlife populations living within their borders. They employed different theoretical lenses—political ecology for Duffy and political economy for Gibson—but the results in both cases gave insights into the dynamics of wildlife policies in Africa that are unequaled in the last two decades in the richness and depth of their political analysis. Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa (Schauer 2019), though, has made a further notable addition to the literature by exploiting archival rather than field research and by adding Tanzania, Uganda, and Malawi to the mix of covered countries. So, what happened over the last twenty years or so to the assumption that domestic politics matter for the fate of African wildlife, which has over that same span of time become a prominent and sustained focus of both scholarly and public interest in global environmental politics? This is an important question, because, in Security and Conservation, Duffy’s most recent book, African politicians and political institutions appear, at best, as bit players in the stories she tells about evolving efforts to contain and constrain the illegal wildlife trade, efforts that have equivalents in other parts of the world. The obvious answer to this question is that conservation has changed. Indeed, in the veryfirst sentence of her newest book, Duffy asserts that the political