Results & Publications

Abstract: This article examines environmental injustice in a semi-rural, post-socialist community through a case study of Băicoi, Romania. Based on ethnographic research, it shows how waste infrastructures, weak regulation, and institutional neglect produced environmental marginality through accumulation by contamination. We introduce the concept of slow labor of contestation to capture residents’ layered civic efforts – monitoring, complaint filing, protest participation, procedural engagement, and legal action – through which they confront prolonged harm. The analysis reveals how environmental knowledge was systematically dismissed, generating intertwined procedural and epistemic injustice in post-socialist waste governance.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2026.2648024

Abstract: Looking at the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) case ‘Gabriel Resources vs Romania’, this paper documents the intangible losses, the chronic stress, and the damaged dignity of communities having to defend their livelihoods in the long-term ongoing conflicts over mineral resources. We expand the concept of environmental injustice as an ‘insidious’ form of toxicity ‘poisoning’ bodies even before chemical contamination, where the threat of ISDS is one of the many tools used by corporate power to reinforce itself. This paper answers scholarly calls for more empirical studies on the ISDS to expose the politics behind incommensurable valuation conflicts and justice as recognition. We analyse the ISDS case as part and parcel of the hegemonic extractivist logic of colonial power, capitalist accumulation by dispossession, and ontological occupation, which have left deep scars in the collective spaces of people imagining possible alternative futures.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2025.2596495

Abstract: Around the world, local communities supported by national and transnational advocacy networks are fighting to defend or preserve their homes and livelihoods from extractivist projects that threaten their environments. In this chapter, we look at Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) as a form of prospective environmental (in)justice (PEJ). ISDS provides for multinational corporations to sue states when they have a grievance over the state’s treatment of their investment. We argue that ISDS continues the structural violence of extractive projects and the pre-project harms resulting from foreign investor-welcoming climates. The chapter draws on empirical research on the Roșia Montană case in Romania to extend the theory of PEJ to scenarios where communities have succeeded in stopping a mining project, but the investor brings arbitration against the state, thus prolonging the “soft” extractive violence. We analyse how grassroots movements formed coalitions with national and foreign NGOs, succeeded in stopping a Canadian mining project based on cyanide extraction, and inscribed Roșia Montană as a UNESCO World Heritage site. In response, the Canadian mining company instigated investment arbitration proceedings against Romania. The case illustrates that, despite the legal victory of the Romanian state, international investment arbitration potentially allows “green crime”, rendering it awfully lawful.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05569-9_12

Abstract: This article analyses how a significant part of the mainstream press in Romania framed the farmers’ protests in January 2024. A complex social phenomenon, with a tradition in Western European countries, especially in France, this transnational revolt movement attracts the attention of journalists only during the actual duration of the street events. The study aims to identify and correlate the preferred framing angles in the mainstream media, to highlight recurring themes, narratives and predominant patterns in the journalistic practice of covering the protests. The questions that formed the basis of the research are the following, namely: 1. How does the mainstream media in Romania frame the farmers’ protests? 2. What are the dominant themes and narratives and how are they correlated with certain ideological frames? 3. Is there an interest in the mainstream media for the intersectional approach of social and environmental justice issues, in the context of the farmers’ protests? The exploratory research was conducted manually on a corpus of 189 journalistic materials, predominantly news, collected from the news sites that covered the most, in quantitative terms, the farmers’ protests of January 2024.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2025.3.06

Abstract: This contribution will address the Romanian working-class novel in its relation to the canonical novelistic production of the early and mid-twentieth century. The chapter discusses several important contributions to the genre before WW2 and the start of the communist period in Romania, as well as the conversation developed within the Romanian literary system with the import of socialist realism in the 1950s and early 1960s. In a paradoxical twist, the Romanian interwar renditions of the genre failed to be canonized following the social realist shift, as they were replaced by an influx of Soviet translations. The General Dictionary of Romanian Literature and The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel serve as the empirical bases for the investigation.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-92306-7_6

Abstract: The 2023-2025 farmers’ protests in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which were sparked by the influx of Ukrainian grain following the re-routing of Ukrainian grain shipments after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, attracted considerable political and social attention at both national and EU level. Most interpretations of these protests can be narrowed down to three somewhat competing assumptions: (i) the farmers’ protests were economically unfounded, as Ukrainian agricultural exports did not damage the CEE markets; (ii) the farmers’ protests were aligned with, or orchestrated by, a specific political force; (iii) these protests jeopardised the EU’s solidarity and support for Ukraine. This article analyses farmers’ protests in Poland, Romania and Hungary in light of the aforementioned assumptions. It reveals the complex socio-economic and political problems faced by farmers in CEE. It concludes that the farmers’ protests are indicative of a systemic crisis of the dominant agri-food regime in which the influx of Ukrainian grain was a trigger rather than a root cause of the crisis.

Link: https://www.tni.org/files/2025-11/WEB_Seeds_of_Discord.pdf