Trafficking transformations: objects as agents in transnational criminal networks

Project Information

TRANSFORM

Grant agreement ID: 804851

DOI

10.3030/804851

Project closed

EC signature date 6 September 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 30 June 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 498 901,00

EU contribution

€ 1 498 901,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT MAASTRICHT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - TRANSFORM (Trafficking transformations: objects as agents in transnational criminal networks)

Reporting period: 2024-07-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Trafficking represents serious transnational crime which challenges our physical, social, economic security. Existing policy is ineffective at reducing the flow of many illicit commodities. We ask: what if our attempts to disrupt this crime fail because they ignore a crucial element within trafficking networks: the trafficked objects themselves?TRANSFORM is based at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, in collaboration with Victoria University at Wellington (New Zealand) and the University of Cape Town (South Africa). Our ethnographic research is global, with particular focus on Southern Africa, the South Pacific, Latin America, and the American Southwest. This project focuses on three types of collectable object: antiquities, collectable wildlife, and fossils. These types of objects inspire passion and profound responses in many people. At times, it seems, this can lead to crimes being committed. By understanding the relationships between people and objects we hope to better understand crime. We hope that through this project we can help to develop a new and more accurate model of the networks that form around and with the objects of crime. We also seek to better understand the complex relationships between people and objects and how those relationships could be better addressed in ant-crime policy.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Over the past 2.5 years, the TRANSFORM project has responded to restrictions on travel by focusing on two things: developing theory related to objects and crime, and focusing on the digital spaces where humans and objects meet and, at times, on digital objects. Unlike other branches of social science and unlike the material humanities, Criminology has only lightly considered the role objects play in human relationships (and crime) meaning that we have had a lot of work to do developing this area. Drawing on the emerging fields of sensory criminology and the criminology of atmosphere and affect, we have now authored numerous papers and book chapters to consider these concepts in relation to various forms of object related crime. This has included a focus on crime at remote rock art sites in the American Southwest, the affective atmosphere of art fairs, the disruptive nature of T. rex fossils, NFTs in the metaverse, the transnational lure of succulents, security and the collectable snake trade from Africa to Europe, and the narratives of violence that underpin sales of cultural objects from the South Pacific. We are starting to paint a picture of multiple networks of agentic objects that act on humans and cause them to act; an irresistible 'desirescape' of relationships that push humans to suspend judgement, spend large sums of money, and at times break the law.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This project is positioned at the edge of existing criminological research and extending considerably beyond it. The discipline of criminology has not ignored the material world. However, studies of the role that discrete ‘objects’ play in crime have been largely (but not completely) restricted to analyses of ‘hot’ objects in the practical field of situational crime prevention. These analyses may provide policy options for target hardening of commonly stolen goods, but they are deficient in their capacity to engage with the sophisticated socially constructed meanings and cultural/economic uses of objects. With our work, we are moving criminological discussion of objects beyond functional analyses, towards considering how the meaningful relationships between people and things shape engagement with criminal activity, response to crime, and the experience of criminal justice.

Cast of Stan the T. rex, Belgium's Natural History Museum. Stan is an object that we are studying.