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

Since the mid-90s three million people living in the metropolitan area of Naples (Italy) have been facing one of the most dramatic socio-ecological crisis 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’. Using evidence from this prolonged socio-ecological crisis, in this chapter, we attempt to inductively mobilise the Polanyian notion of embeddedness, to understand the establishment and expansion of a waste economy in diffused violent social and economic relations. We particularly attempt to extend the notion of ‘embedded economy’, building on the work of Karl Polanyi (1944). We argue that the 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.