ABSTRACT
The illicit market in antiquities, considered on a global scale, has been called a transnational criminal market, and the case studies and discussions of globally moving objects provided throughout this book give a good indication of the reasons why this conceptual analytical terminology seems applicable here. In this respect, it sits alongside other transnational criminal markets, such as trafficking in diamonds, wildlife, people, and counterfeit goods. The literature on illicit antiquities tends only to skirt around the edges of the comparison between antiquities trafficking and these other transnational criminal markets, and a comprehensive analysis of the similarities and differences is needed. This will allow the proper implications to be drawn in terms of crime prevention. In this chapter, we begin to do some of that work, sketching the outline of a framework for the interpretation of transnational criminal markets, and then considering the general lessons that we can learn from observable patterns of successful or unsuccessful interventions in these other transnational criminal markets from a crime prevention perspective.
