Marco Armiero

Rights of Resistance : The Garbage Struggles for Environmental Justice in Campania, Italy

Even when we manage to touch on the productive, ontological dimension of the problematic and the resistances that arise there, however, we will still not be in the position . . . to point to any already existing and concrete elaboration of a political alternative to Empire. And no such effective blueprint will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours. It will arise only in practices. At a certain point in his thinking Marx needed the Paris Commune in order to make the leap and conceive communism in concrete terms as an effective alternative to capitalist society. *Hardt and Negri, Empire, 206

Green Rhetoric in Blackshirts : Italian Fascism and the Environment

In comparison with the significant historiographical work on the German case, specifically on Nazi environmental policies and ideology, studies on such issues for other Fascist regimes are still rather rare. This article attempts partially to fill this gap, at least as regards the Italian case, offering a general overview of the Fascist regime and its environmental politics and narratives. Analysing how Fascists appropriated Italian landscapes through both discourses and concrete policies, this paper examines the construction of a Fascist nature as a rhetorical, symbolic and geographical space. In particular, this essay explores the combined process of appropriation and expropriation through the analysis of two diverse but intertwined issues: firstly, Fascist rural ideology as a narrative on the mutual constituency of nature and people and secondly, the creation of the first Italian national parks, their successes and failures as institutions of nature conservation and their role as symbols of the nature/society divide. While blending the ideas of race, landscape, history, modernity and ruralism, Fascists shaped both the national environment and general ideas about nature in a narrative which affected the very object of the narration that is, nature itself.

Of Humans, Sheep, and Dioxin: A History of Contamination and Transformation in Acerra, Italy

Of Humans, Sheep, and Dioxin : A History of Contamination and Transformation in Acerra, Italy

Beyond “Socially Constructed” Disasters: Re-politicizing the Debate on Large Dams through a Political Ecology of Risk

ABSTRACT Questions of dam safety and hazard potential most often do not take center-stage in contestations and articulations concerning large dams. Through a comparative study of two of Europe’s most emblematic dam disasters – Vajont (Italy) and Ribadelago (Spain) – and the ongoing conflict over the safety of the Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project in Northeast India, this article argues that the damage caused by dam disasters is often not unavoidable or unforeseen but instead allowed to happen. Our cases show that power relations, economic pressures and profit influence “risky” dam management decisions, often disregarding the vernacular knowledge of concerned communities and silencing critical voices that do not fit dominant narratives of modernization and progress. We posit that an essential requirement for re-politicizing the question of dam safety is to unpack the apolitical notion of “socially constructed disasters,” thinking instead about “capital-driven destructions.” By emphasizing resistance against dam projects and against dominant risk discourses across space and time, this article seeks to underline the legitimacy of past and ongoing struggles surrounding the construction of large dams.

Voices, Clues, Numbers : Roaming Among Waste in Campania

A region in the Italian South, Campania comprises five provinces: Avellino, Benevento, Caserta, Salerno, and Naples, with a total population of almost 6 million people. This population, however, is...

Cutting the Fence, Sabotaging the Border: Migration as a Revolutionary Practice

In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. (Executive Order on Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, White House, January 27, 2017)

Making Italians out of rocks: Mussolini's shadows on Italian mountains

In this article I use the case of mountains to explore the ways in which the Fascist regime articulated its vision of nature/human relationships. I will show how mountains were considered as creative environments which could produce a special type of people: the montanari (mountaineers), meaning with this word mountain villagers rather than mountain climbers. The Fascist regime praised people from the mountains – especially from the Alps - as the true and better stock of Italians; that environment made them strong, healthy, pure, and disciplined, as the rhetoric of the Great War had supported. The Fascist regime celebrated the virtues of montanari by birth, those who were born and raised in the mountains, but it also aimed at employing the creative power of nature in its plan to shape the new Italian. In the article I show how the regime employed mountains in its discourses and practices of ‘bonifica umana’ (human reclamation) which involved both body and soul. In the Fascist narratives, mountains were th...

Introduction: Fascism and nature

It is imperative that we create; we, people from this epoch and this generation, because we have the duty to make the face of the Fatherland unknowable both spiritually and materially. In ten years, comrades, Italy will be unrecognizable! This will be because we will have transformed it, we will have made a new one, from the mountains which we will have covered with their green coat, to the fields which will be completely reclaimed .... (Mussolini 1926)