Roma, the Convenient Scapegoat. Intersectional Perspectives on Environmental Justice in Romania

Roma communities in Romania are systematically exposed to environmental hazards due to extractive and industrial practices that deepen structural violence and historical racial inequalities. The resulting territorial stigmatization deeply affects Roma’s relation with the environment, community, culture and identity. Although recent debates in the environmental justice (EJ) literature have emphasized the need for a deeper intersectional approach to EJ, this framework remains largely underdeveloped and unexplored in the context of Eastern Europe, particularly regarding Roma communities. This article draws from data collected on environmental conflicts in three different contexts in Romania (forests, mines, and land grabbing), to show how Roma communities’ experience of environmental injustices is shaped by intersecting forms of oppression, including racialization, poverty and gender/labor exploitation. Employing critical EJ theory as well as postcolonial approaches to interpret our qualitative findings, we reveal how relationality and positionality as power structures reinforce a colonial mindset, in which the Roma are treated as a subordinated class. We use Collins’ matrix of domination to illustrate that exercised power among Roma in displaced communities is intersecting in multidimensional ways. With this, the authors bring their contributions to the research on Roma EJ by expanding the theory with Roma EJ with a contextual focus on Eastern Europe.