The research for the paper, which explores how looted goods such as ancient statues, fossils, or live animals are trafficked around the globe and into museums and the homes of the wealthy, continues an interest that has stayed with him throughout his career.

His previous academic projects involved fieldwork in Thailand and Cambodia, studying temple theft. “Things get ripped off the temples and then they’re trafficked across borders. They end up in big auction houses or museums—sometimes the most well-known museums in the world,” he says.

“You’ll be looking at these amazing statues and wondering where they’re from—and a large number of them will have come from theft originally.”

The criminology of objects

In sociology and criminology, researchers are often studying people and their motivations. Why do people commit crime? And how do you stop them? However, an emerging trend in social analysis is concerned with objects. This considers that the world is not just made up of people, it’s made up of objects too. “Some of these objects make us feel certain ways that can prompt us into action. So we chose these objects to study because they seem to be influential in that way,” says Professor Mackenzie.

In talking to collectors for their recent paper, the authors came to understand that it’s an incredibly emotional thing for their subjects. It’s also often very profitable, but that’s not the only reason people commit this kind of crime.

“People feel really passionate about collecting, and so part of the research is investigating the stories that people tell about what they’re doing, which fits into a bigger story about the human condition.

“We all tell ourselves stories to try and justify what we really want to be doing. We’re socially constructing reality to be how we would like it to be, rather than how it actually is. Most sophisticated collectors of specialist objects like those at the high end of the fossils or cultural property trades will know about the problems at the source end of the supply chain. But whether they will act on that knowledge, that’s a different question.”

Cultural heritage trafficking

In 2012 Professor Mackenzie won a grant for €1m from the European Union and set up the Trafficking Culture Project, as a global hub to monitor trafficking, gather evidence, do research, and set up teams.

“Cultural heritage trafficking happens in most of the poor countries in the world,” he says. “They are the most resource-rich countries in terms of antiquities, such as the ancient Khmer statues we followed out of Cambodia—but they are financially not so well off, and their cultural and natural heritage is vulnerable to the markets in affluent countries. There’s a push and pull effect going on.”

Following that four-year project, he then undertook another five-year €1.5m project starting in 2020, again funded by the European Research Council. Here he was working with colleagues in The Netherlands and South Africa, and the research went beyond the illicit antiquities market to look at the comparable global trades in illegal wildlife and fossils.

“The dynamics of the markets are quite similar. These resource-rich but relatively financially poor countries have a lot of valuable things out in the open, which are more or less unguarded. It may be abandoned temples in the jungle, flora and fauna in the wild, or fossils buried in rock formations. Finding the resources for policing to protect these things is not easy, especially considering all the other priorities for law enforcement. There may also be entrenched cultures of corruption in those countries,” Professor Mackenzie says.

“All of this adds up to a criminal opportunity: rare, precious things are there to be excavated or poached, and there are collecting markets overseas which make the items highly valuable”.

Professor Mackenzie says these are essentially global illegal business operations, with organised criminals interfacing with white collar markets in order to steal things, move them around the world, and sell them to people who want them.

The overlap of white-collar crime and organised crime

Mackenzie is part of a group of criminologists questioning the traditional, and perhaps now outdated, understanding of white-collar crime and organised crime as being fundamentally different types of activity. This is not the case in contemporary examples of globally networked market-based crimes like the forms of trafficking his team is studying. Instead, his research suggests that white-collar crime and organised crime overlap and intersect in this area, as organised looting gangs and traffickers connect with receptive high-end global businesses and consumers.

One of the stories Professor Mackenzie investigated involved a statue that was offered for sale at a major auction house in New York for US$3m. During the sale process, its provenance was called into question. The researchers went back to the temple complex it originated from in Cambodia, and found the entire place was devastated, with many other items looted as well. They tracked down and spoke to some of the people who had done that looting. They talked about people struggling for survival, with Cambodia being devastated in the 1970s when many of the statues had been taken, amid the torrid history of the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. Looting temples was seen as a way to find their way out of that.

Arguments are often made in favour of collecting these items: that it’s good for things to be in a museum because more people can see them than if they’re stuck in a jungle in Cambodia, that they act as cultural ambassadors, that they can be looked after. “The counter argument is that this is a form of colonialism and theft,” says Professor Mackenzie.

The research studies contribute to ethical conversations and international policies around solving the problem, as well as greater awareness of the issue. “It also fits in with other conversations that we have about how we as consumers live in the world,” says Professor Mackenzie. “As in so many things, the power is in your hands as a relatively affluent global citizen to decide what you’re going to buy and to make decisions about ethics. If we stop buying this stuff, people would not be stealing it."

Difficult knowledge, and telling stories to conceal the truth

In psycho-social branches of criminology, there's a line of investigation into difficult, or suppressed, knowledge—the things that we know but also, somehow, choose not to know. “You can hold in your head this knowledge about awful things, but you don't like that knowledge, it’s not easy to live with. So you find a way to ignore it. Perhaps you tell yourself stories that conceal the truth.

“One of the most popular stories in the antiquities trade is the ‘accidental find’ where a farmer has happened upon an artefact on his land and now wants to save it by passing it on to the collecting market. A helpful fantasy for those who are driven to collect, and know they are committing crime in doing so. Or perhaps you just don’t ask questions when you are buying, because you don’t want to know the answers. There are many ways that we all live with knowing that we're not as good as we would like to be.”

Professor Mackenzie explained the case of Douglas Latchford, a British art dealer, who was charged with trafficking stolen Cambodian antiquities. He was in his eighties and died before the case concluded. His daughter inherited and then repatriated his collection, which was a world-class collection of Khmer statues. Dozens of statues have been returned to Cambodia. Professor Mackenzie points out that cases like these are the results of an extensive international effort by many different people and organisations.

“It’s a happy result for sure,” says Professor Mackenzie, “but the end goal on the academic side is to try and unwind the dynamics of the whole criminal enterprise so things aren’t looted or poached in the first place. Contributing evidence into the legal and policy debate around repatriating stolen objects is one element of that, but there is also the bigger picture of how to develop, and police, ethical global collecting markets in the long run.

“The core challenge of it for me is that all the people involved, in their own different ways, have a narrative on their side. Some of those narratives are more plausible than others, but even the less objectively defensible ones are worth studying, because they help explain why, and how, people make the choices they do. Often, they're trying to make something that's inherently bad seem like it's good. It’s part of the modern malaise—style over substance, words above deeds. It doesn't really matter what you do, it’s what you say about it that counts. If you can talk a good game, you can transform anything into something that looks like it's good or positive. Even theft.”

The paper, Irregularly regulated collecting markets: antiquities, fossils, and wildlife (Springer, 2024) can be found here.