Forests of Fear: Illegal Logging, Criminalization, and Violence in the Carpathian Mountains

Abstract

In this article we explore the twisted consequences of the worldwide turn toward prohibitive policies and criminalization in conservation. We argue that tackling environmental challenges with legal repertoires that are coercive and punitive in nature increases criminalization and produces insidious and overt forms of violence. Tough-on-crime measures aimed at curbing illegal logging advance social vulnerabilities, further marginalizing already disenfranchised rural populations. Also, such measures trigger the formation of a culture of patronage, secrecy, fear, and anger, which facilitates the rise of forest violence. Transformations of forest use under increasingly harsh regimes of conservation have been documented worldwide, but these processes in Eastern Europe have received far less scholarly attention. Here we explore forest criminalization in Romania after it became a member state of the European Union, looking at different groups of alleged wrongdoers: petty community users, local forestry businessmen, and forestry officers. Drawing on interviews with forestry and conservation actors, media analysis, and ethnographic research of communities for which illegal logging was an everyday reality, we show how criminalization escalated into insidious forms of violence and the deepening of rural vulnerabilities.