I was delivering a guest lecture in 2021, discussing the challenges of countering the illegal wildlife trade due to the power of the criminal networks and the elite interests involved, and the limited resources available to CIWT organizations. After discussing the role of corruption in enabling IWT in both a national and international context, we moved to audience questions. A man raised his hand and asked why we couldn't just agree to pay the president of a country $1 million each year if they stopped poaching within their borders. His argument was that if elites benefited economically from conservation, they would stop the corruption enabling the trade and use national law enforcement to clamp down on IWT networks, bringing the trade to the end in a simple and cost-effective manner.

Although there are policy, ethical and practical challenges with such a policy, that argument struck a chord with me. Criminal networks are involved in the trade because it is low risk and lucrative; getting powerful interests to support conservation, and not IWT, would help change that. This chapter seeks to delve more deeply into that argument by examining how to break up the criminal networks driving high-value IWT, nationally and internationally. As such this chapter moves from the tactical, local level of “save the animal to kill the trade”, to the strategic national and international level. It considers how we might effectively counter these organized networks and their illicit financial flows. I examine efforts to apply existing models for countering financial crime to CIWT and the successes that has achieved. I emphasize the value of utilizing existing approaches from outside of the sector, backed up with the resources and experienced specialists to deliver them. In particular I explore what we can learn from counterinsurgency techniques. I argue that CIWT is similar to a low-intensity counterinsurgency environment, where disillusioned local populations support poachers (insurgents) against the rangers (the government). Drawing on British Army procedures, I show how best-practice counterinsurgency approaches share lessons for CIWT through their focus on winning the support of the human terrain (the local population) and a limited, highly-targeted law-enforcement effort against the highest levels in an insurgent (poacher) group.