This review explores the way that the illegal hunting phenomenon has been framed by research. We demarcate three main approaches that have been used to deconstruct the crime. These include ‘drivers of the deviance’, ‘profiling perpetrators’ and ‘categorizing the crime’. Disciplinary silo thinking on the part of prominent theories, an overreliance on either a micro or a macro perspective, and adherence to either an instrumental or normative perspective are identified as weaknesses in existing approaches. Based on these limitations in addressing sociopolitical dimensions of the phenomenon, we call for a more integrative understanding that moves illegal hunting from being approached as a ‘crime’ or ‘deviance’ to being seen as a political phenomenon driven by the concepts of defiance and radicalization.