Since the mid-1990s, three million people living in the metropolitan area of Naples (Italy) have been facing one of the most dramatic socio-ecological crises witnessed in Western Europe. This is a crisis orchestrated by Mafia-like organizations (e.g., the Neapolitan Mafia also known as Camorra) and their interest in the illegal management of waste disposal and incineration in the shadow of a weak state, a phenomenon often referred to as the “Land of Fires.” In this chapter, the authors attempt to inductively theorise from this prolonged socio-ecological crisis as an exemplar process of embeddedness of market economies in diffused illegal and violent social and economic relations. They use the Land of Fires to extend the notion of “embedded economy,” building on the work of Karl Polanyi. The authors argue that this process of social embeddedness through illegal and violent practices are particularly intense in contexts of socio-ecological crises, where the expropriation of land and destruction of nature is coupled with the disarticulation of the role of the state by criminal organizations.
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Since the mid-90s, three million people living in the metropolitan area of Naples (Italy) have been facing one of the most catastrophic and dramatic socio-ecological crises witnessed in Western Europe. This is a crisis orchestrated by Mafia-like organizations, e.g. the Neapolitan Mafia also known as Camorra, and private businesses, due to their economic interest in the management of waste disposal and incineration. While a mixed of legal and illegal waste economy emerged, in the shadow of a weak national state, thousands of local citizens have initiated public protest and grassroots movements to oppose to the impact of the crisis on their health and the surrounding environment. This well-documented phenomenon has been labelled the ‘Land of Fires’ (LoF) (D'Alisa et al., 2017; Berruti and Palestino, 2020), in relation to the diffused practice of burning of waste and rubbish in the streets and farmlands. However, what the LoF defines is a wider human and economic geography of continued socio-ecological and political struggles, due to the presence of an illegal and violent regime (D'Alisa et al., 2010; D’Alisa et al., 2017). This regime emerged in the general void of legality and accountability of the public authorities and private businesses in charge of managing waste (Iengo and Armiero, 2017; Cavotta et al., 2021), and more in general the absence of the (Italian) state in ‘regulating’ violence in this region (Armiero and D’Alisa, 2013; Berruti and Palestino, 2020). This crisis also reflects the complexity and ambiguity of institutional dynamics beyond this specific geography, where the expansion of so-called market economies generates illegal political, economic and social practices, with which they have deeply intertwined over time (D’Alisa et al., 2017). In this context, illegal waste management activities have become one of the many ‘markets’ for the Neapolitan Camorra, and other forms of organised crime (D’Amato et al., 2015; Lucchini and Membretti, 2016). At the same time, despite the continued crisis, and the extreme socio-ecological conditions, collective actions (e.g. NGOs) and social movements to fight these practices have struggled to emerge, with civil society organisations and political activists failing to mobilise resources in a large and effective scale (Scafuto and La Barbera, 2016; Lucchini and Membretti, 2016). Between the Neapolitan Mafia and the environmentalist activists, both the state and private businesses assumed a rather ambiguous role, contributing to the emergence of both the legal and illegal waste economies, on one hand, and the silencing and marginalisation of the environmentalist movement, on the other hand (Berruti and Palestino, 2020).