Transnational environmental crime: From securitization to intervention and statebuilding

Transnational environmental crime, along with the range of enabling and convergent crimes that make practices such as the illegal wildlife trade and timber trafficking possible, are usually assumed to be deeply intertwined with state weakness and weak states. This chapter examines these assumptions against the backdrop of contemporary debates about statebuilding and intervention. It uncovers multiple versions of the state and associated intervention strategies embedded in public policy responses to the challenges of transnational environmental crime. In doing so, it provides a critique of strategies of intervention (in this case against transnational criminality) that seek to replicate the practices of strong states in an orthodox Weberian sense.