Page 52 - An Illusion of Complicity: Terrorism and the Illegal Ivory Trade in East Africa

Tom Maguire and Cathy Haenlein 39

The continued emphasis on such militarised approaches ignores growing consensus in academic,
practitioner and research communities that more nuanced approaches are needed.34 There
is broad agreement that these should combine hard-security, community-engagement and
development programmes.35 Too dominant a front-line focus also means that responses barely
touch the mid- and high-level crime bosses orchestrating the trade. Beyond this, they result in a
failure to address the institutionalised complicity of a range of entities and individuals.

Decades of international experience in countering drug trafficking have shown the limited
effects of low-level, militarised responses aimed at the supply side. Indeed, many have noted
that lessons from the global fight against other forms of organised crime have been inadequately
incorporated into the fight against the illegal ivory trade.36 ‘Whack-a-mole’ strategies involving
expensively equipped rangers targeting poachers from local communities will likely be as
ineffective in the fight against ivory trafficking as in the fight against other forms of illicit trade.37
Instead, approaches must aim higher, disrupting the relevant OCGs and tackling corruption
higher up the chain.

In this sense, the prevalence of ivory–terrorism narratives is unlikely to have helped in the design
of responses tailored to the actual operational dynamics of organised criminality. Yet responses
to these organised criminal dynamics may be equally – and perhaps more fundamentally –
affected by more deep-seated intelligence and investigative capacity problems on the ground.
These issues affect wildlife, law-enforcement and customs agencies as well as national courts
– resulting in weaknesses in collecting intelligence, developing cases and presenting them in
court. East Africa-based law-enforcement officers have long stressed the debilitating impact
of these capacity gaps. In 2010, Lusaka Agreement Task Force director, Bonaventure Ebayi,
publicised the issue, stating that ‘We require improved capacity building in intelligence
collection, investigations and making follow-ups to defeat the trade’.38

34. Rosaleen Duffy, ‘Waging a War to Save Biodiversity: The Rise of Militarized Conservation’,
International Affairs (Vol. 90, No. 4, 2014), pp. 819–34; Elizabeth Lunstrum, ‘Green Militarization:
Anti-Poaching Efforts and the Spatial Contours of Kruger National Park’, Annals of the Association
of American Geographers (Vol. 104, No. 4, 2014), pp. 816–32; Natasha White, ‘The “White Gold of
Jihad”: Violence, Legitimisation and Contestation in Anti-Poaching Strategies’, Journal of Political
Ecology (Vol. 21, 2014), pp. 452–74; John Owens, ‘Infrastructure and Guns May Curb Wildlife
Trafficking’, Global Wildlife Conservation Group Blog (University of Texas), 27 April 2015, <https://
sites.utexas.edu/wildlife/2015/04/27/infrastructure-and-guns-may-curb-wildlife-trafficking/>,
accessed 23 August 2015.

35. For a discussion of this, see Cathy Haenlein and Tom Maguire, ‘Countering Poaching and Wildlife
Crime: Engaging from the Ground Up’, RUSI Newsbrief (Vol. 35, No. 4, July 2015), pp. 21–24.

36. EIA, ‘In Cold Blood: Combating Organised Wildlife Crime’, February 2014, p. 19.
37. Analysis by C4ADS and a team of researchers at the Wilson Center has come to similar conclusions.

See Vira and Ewing, ‘Ivory’s Curse’, p. 14; Cameron Lagrone and Josh Busby, ‘Is Wildlife Trafficking
a National Security Threat?’, New Security Beat (Wilson Center), 10 June 2015, <http://www.
newsecuritybeat.org/2015/06/wildlife-trafficking-national-security-threat>, accessed 17 August
2015.
38. East African, ‘Militant Groups Fuel Poaching in East Africa’, 14 October 2010.