Paradise Lost?: Understanding Social Embeddedness Through Crisis and Violence in the Neapolitan “Land of Fires”

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.