NRESi Colloquium - The Convergence of Wildlife Trafficking with Other Activities of Organized Crime - Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown
This colloquium is sponsored by UNBC TWS (The Wildlife Society).
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The early hope that the COVID-19 catastrophe, combined with China’s 2018 ban on ivory sales, would produce a substantial and lasting decline in poaching and wildlife trafficking has withered (IWT). Few countries learned from COVID-19 to increase conservation efforts. Not only are poaching and IWT up once again, they are expanding to new geographic areas, including across the Americas. Meanwhile, not just Chinese criminal groups, but other large potent organized crime actors, such as the Mexican cartels, are entering IWT and illegal logging, with the economies in natural resources increasingly converging with drug trafficking and other criminal activities. What are the policy implications?
Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution where she directs The Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and the Fentanyl Epidemic in North America and the Global Reach of Synthetic Opioids series and co-directs the Africa Security Initiative. She is an expert on international and internal conflicts and nontraditional security threats, including insurgency, terrorism, organized crime, urban violence, and illicit economies, such as wildlife trafficking and drug trafficking. Her fieldwork and research have covered, among others, Afghanistan, South Asia, Burma, Indonesia, the Andean region, Mexico, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, and various parts of Africa. Dr. Felbab-Brown is the author of five books - The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It (Hurst-Oxford, 2017); Militants, Criminals, and Outsiders: The Challenge of Local Governance in an Age of Disorder (Brookings, 2017; co-authored with Shadi Hamid and Harold Trinkunas); Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan (Brookings, 2013); Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Brookings 2010), and Narco Noir: Mexico’s Cartels, Cops, and Corruption (Brookings, forthcoming) - as well as numerous academic and policy articles, reports, opeds, and blogs. She has researched and written extensively about various aspects of poaching, wildlife trafficking and illegal logging as well as the effectiveness of various conservation efforts. Some of her recent reports and articles include “China-linked Wildlife Poaching and Trafficking in Mexico,” that revealed the linkages between Mexican drug cartels and Chinese criminal groups; “How Do We Resist? – Organized Crime is Taking Over Mexican Fisheries – Part II,” and “Preventing Pandemics Through Biodiversity Conservation and Smart Wildlife Trade Regulation.” A frequent commentator in U.S. and international media, Dr. Felbab-Brown regularly provides U.S. congressional testimony on these issues. She has also been the recipient of numerous awards in recognition of her scholarly and policy contributions. Dr. Felbab-Brown received her Ph.D. in political science from MIT and her B.A. in government from Harvard University.
The Natural Resources & Environmental Studies Institute (NRESi) at UNBC hosts a weekly lecture series at the Prince George campus. Anyone from the university or wider community with interest in the topic area is welcome to attend. Presentations are also made available to remote participants through Zoom Webinar. Go to http://www.unbc.ca/nres-institute/colloquium-webcasts to view the presentation remotely.
Past NRESi colloquium presentations and special lectures can be viewed on our video archive, available here.