Wildlife Crime and State Security in South(ern) Africa: An Overview of Developments

There is a growing interest in wildlife crime and security issues, which is inspired by the popular but problematic poacher-as-terrorist narrative. As poaching has been integral to the creation of enclosures, the question of how it becomes a national and global security issue is pertinent to analyses of the poaching-security linkages. I engage this question by tracing changing meanings of the poacher and their relations to security during the Cold War and in post-apartheid South(ern) Africa. These historical moments reveal, first, the relevance of the regional context to discussions on the intersection between poaching and security in South(ern) Africa. Second, they shed light on the evolution of poaching as a security code. Third, they show that the discursive poaching-security link takes place at various levels across time. I argue that this link does not cohere in South(ern) Africa in part because of shifts in the meanings of the poacher.