Room 6.23 - Kramer Law Building

Dr. Annette Hübschle is a Chief Research Officer in the Public Law Department and co-leads the Global Risk Governance Programme affiliated with the Centre of Criminology at the University of Cape Town. She leads the Environmental and Planetary Futures research group, which focuses on the governance of environmental, climate and AI risks and harms, illegal markets, and transnational crimes. Her work sits at the intersection of public law, criminology, and economic sociology, with a particular focus on how harms are produced, governed, and contested across socio-ecological systems.
A core contribution of her scholarship is the development and application of harmscapes as a lens for analysing environmental and security harms, including how these harms are distributed unevenly across the Global South and how communities live with and respond to them. She also works on contested and irregular regulation (including legal pluralities and “grey zones”), examining how regulatory ambiguity and enforcement choices shape illegal and legal markets—especially in wildlife, collectables, and resource economies.
Her newer research advances AI harmscapes: the risks, governance gaps, and justice implications emerging from AI systems as they interact with unequal infrastructures, exclusion, and environmental and security futures. In this area, she leads the AI governance and community engagement streams of the IDRC-funded African hub for AI Safety, Peace and Security at UCT.

Current and recent research projects

Her research group is involved in major international and policy-facing projects, including:

• Safeguarding Southern Africa’s Succulents (DEFRA Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund): analysing demand and supply networks driving the illegal succulent trade.
• Friction and flows (National Academies/DSI PEER COVID-19 grant): COVID-19 impacts on wildlife economies and regulatory responses.
• Wildlife trafficking and zoonotic pathogen biosafety (US-funded consortium, GLTFCA): intersectional security risks at the wildlife–health interface.
• Ocean harmscapes (UNDP): examining the governance of transnational maritime environmental crimes, illegal exploitation of marine resources, & examining how digital traces, OSINT, platform data, and other forms of digital evidence are governed, gathered, interpreted, and used in investigations and prosecutions, including challenges around legality, admissibility, accountability, and rights protections across jurisdictions.
• Structure and functioning of illegal markets: editing of the Oxford Handbook of Illegal Markets
• AI harmscapes: AI advancing context-sensitive AI safety governance through research, policy development, and capacity building to detect and mitigate AI harms, especially those affecting marginalised groups.

Background and advisory roles

Annette holds a PhD in Social Sciences and Economics from the University of Cologne / International Max Planck Research School and an MPhil in Criminal Justice from UCT. She previously worked as a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, including research on organised crime and money laundering. She serves as a senior research advisor to the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime and contributes to expert and advisory processes in environmental governance and wildlife crime prevention.

Teaching and supervision

Annette supervises Master’s and PhD candidates in the Faculties of Law and Science and contributes to teaching on environmental governance, illegal markets, contested regulation, and 21st-century harmscapes.

Research interests

• Harmscapes and security governance (including ocean, wildlife, and AI harmscapes)
• Contested and irregular regulation; legal pluralities and grey-zone governance
• Illegal and variably legal markets; the interface between licit/illicit economies
• Environmental and maritime crimes; resource extraction and socio-ecological harms
• AI governance, risk, and justice in African and Global South contexts

Publications (Recent)

Books

• Massé, Francis, A Hübschle, L Gutiérrez, R W.Y. Wong and T Wyatt (eds), 2025. Routledge Handbook of Wildlife Crime. London: Routledge (Routledge Environment and Sustainability Handbooks). 348 pages. https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Wildlife-Crime/Masse-Hubschle-Gutierrez-Wong-Wyatt/p/book/9781032368146

Journal Articles (recent)

• Gore, M., Hübschle, A., Dabezies, J.M., Cassolis, N.M. et al, van Heerden, H., Wolfe, B.A., Williams, V.L., Curtin, K.M., Kammer-Kerwick, M. and Hamming, P. (2025). Community-based co-production of knowledge about wildlife trade and anthrax as a high-consequence pathogen. Bioscience. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf137
• Lindley, J. and Hübschle, A. (2024). Transnational Maritime Environmental Crimes. Frontiers in Conservation Science 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2024.1495064
• Hübschle, A. and Lindley, J. (2024). Blue Crimes and Ocean Harmscapes: Strategies for Tackling Transnational Maritime Environmental Crimes in the Global South, Frontiers in Conservation Science 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2024.1422829
• Hübschle, A. and Berg, J. (2024) Southern blue criminology: Rethinking ocean harmscapes in a global context. Frontiers in Conservation Science 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2024.1422829
• Hübschle, A. and Margulies, J. (2024) The need for a socioecological harm reduction approach to reduce illegal wildlife trade. Conservation Biology 38 (5):e14335. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14335
• Mackenzie, S., Yates, D., Hübschle, A. and Berzina, D. (2024) Irregularly regulated collecting markets: antiquities, fossils, and wildlife. Crime, Law and Social Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-024-10171-9
• Hübschle, A., Kerina, K., Mogende, E. and Suping, K. (2024). Voices from the frontlines: Elite capture of environmental activism, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.3317
• Goyes, D.R., Hübschle, A.M, Okafor-Yarwood, I., South, N. (2024). Green Criminological Dialogues: Voices from Africa, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.3244
• Hübschle, A. and Gore, M. (2024). Lessons in resilience from the illegal wildlife trade during COVID-19 lockdowns. Science of the Total Environment, 916: 170365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.170365

Book Chapters

• Massé, F, A Hübschle, L Gutiérrez, R W. Y. Wong, T Wyatt. 2025. Introduction - Beyond boundaries. Foundations and Frameworks in critical wildlife crime studies. In F Massé, A Hübschle, L Gutiérrez, R W.Y. Wong and T Wyatt (eds), Routledge Handbook of Wildlife Crime. London: Routledge. pp. 1-13. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003333906
• Hübschle, A. 2025. Wildlife harmscapes and whole-of-society responses: Beyond criminalisation towards inclusive conservation. In F Massé, A Hübschle, L Gutiérrez, RWY Wong and T Wyatt (eds), Routledge Handbook of Wildlife Crime. London: Routledge, pp. 161–173. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003333906-16
• Hübschle, A. (2025) Contested illegality: Understanding legitimacy challenges in wildlife governance. The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Policy and Law. London: Palgrave Publishers, pp. 357–384. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30231-2_2-1
• Hübschle, A. (2025).Community responses to wildlife crime. In Rob White (ed), Elgar Encyclopaedia of Environmental Crime .pp. 285-292. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803923833.00053
• Dore, A., Hübschle, A., & Batley, M. 2022. Towards environmental restorative justice in South Africa: How to understand and address wildlife offences. In B. Pali, M. Forsyth, & F. Tepper (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Restorative Justice. London: Palgrave McMillan, pp. 333-360. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04223-2_14
• Mackenzie, S., Hübschle, A and Yates, D. 2020. Global Trade in Stolen Culture and Nature as Neocolonial Hegemony, In J Blaustein, et al. (eds.), The Emerald Handbook of Crime, Justice and Sustainable Development. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, pp. 419-436. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78769-355-520201023
• Hübschle, A. 2019. Fluid interfaces between flows of rhino horn. In: A. Amicelle, et al. (eds.), The Policing of Flows: Challenging Contemporary Criminology. London: Routledge, pp. 19-38.