Forests of Fear: Illegal Logging, Criminalization, and Violence in the Carpathian Mountains

Abstract

In this article we explore the twisted consequences of the worldwide turn toward prohibitive policies and criminalization in conservation. We argue that tackling environmental challenges with legal repertoires that are coercive and punitive in nature increases criminalization and produces insidious and overt forms of violence. Tough-on-crime measures aimed at curbing illegal logging advance social vulnerabilities, further marginalizing already disenfranchised rural populations. Also, such measures trigger the formation of a culture of patronage, secrecy, fear, and anger, which facilitates the rise of forest violence. Transformations of forest use under increasingly harsh regimes of conservation have been documented worldwide, but these processes in Eastern Europe have received far less scholarly attention. Here we explore forest criminalization in Romania after it became a member state of the European Union, looking at different groups of alleged wrongdoers: petty community users, local forestry businessmen, and forestry officers. Drawing on interviews with forestry and conservation actors, media analysis, and ethnographic research of communities for which illegal logging was an everyday reality, we show how criminalization escalated into insidious forms of violence and the deepening of rural vulnerabilities.

本文探讨了世界自然保护转向禁止性政策和刑事定罪的扭曲后果。我们认为, 用强制性和惩罚性的法律手段来应对环境挑战, 会增加刑事定罪, 产生微妙而显性的暴力形式。严厉打击犯罪的措施, 旨在遏制非法砍伐, 也加剧了社会脆弱性, 使得已经被剥夺权利的农村人口被进一步边缘化。此外, 这些措施形成了一种庇护、保密、恐惧和愤怒文化, 助长了森林暴力的上升。在日益严厉的自然保护制度下, 世界各地都记载了森林利用的转变, 但学术界很少关注东欧。我们探讨了成为欧盟成员国后罗马尼亚的森林刑事定罪, 考察了被指控的另类不法群体: 小社区使用者、当地林业商人和林业官员。通过对林业和自然保护人士的采访、媒体分析以及对非法砍伐已成为日常现实的社区的民族志研究, 我们展示了刑事定罪如何升级为微妙的暴力形式、并加深了农村的脆弱性。

En este artículo exploramos las torcidas consecuencias del giro de alcance mundial hacia las políticas prohibitivas y la criminalización en la conservación. Consideramos que abordar los retos ambientales con repertorios legales, que son coercitivos y punitivos por naturaleza, incrementa la criminalización y genera formas de violencia insidiosas y manifiestas de violencia. Las medidas que prescriben mano dura contra los criminales, orientadas a frenar la tala ilegal, promueven las vulnerabilidades sociales, marginando todavía más las poblaciones rurales, inveteradamente cortas en derechos. Tales medidas también desencadenan el desarrollo de una cultura de clientelismo, secreto, temor e ira, lo cual facilita una mayor violencia forestal. En todo el mundo se han documentado las transformaciones del uso del bosque, bajo regímenes de conservación cada vez más severos, pero tales procesos en Europa Oriental han recibido mucha menos atención de los académicos. Aquí exploramos la criminalización del bosque en Rumania después de que este país se convirtiera en estado miembro de la Unión Europea, analizando distintos grupos de presuntos infractores: pequeños usuarios comunitarios, empresarios forestales locales y agentes forestales. A partir de entrevistas con actores forestales y conservacionistas, análisis de los medios de comunicación e investigaciones etnográficas de comunidades para las cuales la tala ilegal es una realidad cotidiana, mostramos cómo la criminalización escaló hasta formas insidiosas de violencia y la profundización de vulnerabilidades rurales.

Key Words:

• criminalization
• illegal logging
• political forests
• Romania
• violence

关键词:

• 刑事定罪
• 非法砍伐
• 政治森林
• 罗马尼亚
• 暴力。

Palabras clave:

• bosques políticos
• criminalización
• Rumania
• tala ilegal
• violencia.

In October 2019, Liviu Pop, a young forester and father of three, was found dead in a forest considered a hotspot of illegal logging in the north of Romania. The circumstances of his death were unclear. He was apparently shot with his own gun by loggers involved with the local “forest mafia.” As the media revealed, the first legal investigations were only half-hearted; the authorities discharged the prime suspects and suggested the incident was the forester’s own mistake. Accusing the prosecutors of corruption, a movement formed to demand justice. Hundreds of foresters took to the streets to protest the escalation of forest violence, demanding augmented means for law enforcement, such as legal protection and firearms. Since the late 1990s, 700 Romanian foresters have been threatened and assaulted while on duty, and six lost their lives in clashes with illegal loggers. Although these events exposed the precarious conditions of foresters, portraying them as righteous victims defending forests, they also concealed the underlying systemic conditions that made this violence soar. They concealed the precarious livelihoods of petty loggers and the emergence of an environment of fear surrounding forestry operations, caused by increased criminalization and broader mechanisms of law enforcement. Our aim in this article is to examine the broader dynamics emerging in Romanian forestry in recent decades, which facilitate such acts of violence, and to show that physical violence is only the most striking, the visible tip of the iceberg, even as a broader and more insidious field of violence festers underneath.

Histories of forests are violent everywhere. Forests are perhaps quintessentially violent environments (Peluso and Watts 2001; Peluso and Vandergeest 2020). Physical violence happens between multiple actors who struggle to use forests, as well as to control and police them: environmental enforcers, foresters, loggers, wildlife poaching mafias, plantation companies, conservationists, vigilante groups, militaries, insurgents. As we show in this article, however, multiple forms of violence other than physical, and more insidious, can occur—intimidation, self-inflicted violence resulting from fear of repression, passing unfair laws that exacerbate inequalities—but often remain invisible, not being especially newsworthy. Recently, trends of securitization and militarization of conservation have made worldwide ever-growing protected areas into territories of armed violence and dispossession, marginalization and displacement, allowing for the rise of “green violence” (see Duffy 2016; Massé and Lunstrum 2016; Dutta 2020; Marijnen and Verweijen 2020; Woods and Naimark 2020). In forested areas, the entanglements between social vulnerability and illegal logging worldwide generate violence, affecting various groups, from environmental defenders to precarious forest-dependent dwellers (Le Billon and Lujala 2020). Crises of deforestation across the globe legitimize a rise in measures meant to undo its environmental consequences, among which law enforcement and fighting corruption are priorities (To and Mahanty 2019). As aptly put in a recent article by McSweeney (2023), though, the “golden rule” of prohibitionary regulation is that “while it makes criminals of anyone involved in a banned trade, enforcement disproportionally targets and vilifies its most vulnerable participants.”

Moreover, such declared states of environmental emergency and the unfolding of online hysteria legitimize and normalize the use of violence by troops in the name of conservation (Neumann 2004). The situation is not different within the European Union (EU). Current EU policy stresses the importance of adequate forest protection to meet the organization’s ambitions of leading the global fight against climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. A new EU Forest Strategy is emerging and the European Green Deal considers healthy and sustainably managed forests as prerequisites for relaunching the economy and human well-being, but these visions of green growth call for tighter law enforcement and increased criminalization. Such efforts to curb illegal logging and halt imported deforestation have yielded little success, though (Bager et al. 2020). Current economic growth strategies give precedence to forest protection through criminalization and resource securitization, but those whose livelihoods depend on the forest bear the brunt, enduring increased marginalization and structural symbolic violence (Le Billon 2018; Vasile and Iordăchescu 2022), often building on and reembedding long-standing colonial and racist approaches to conservation.

After Romania became an EU member state in 2007, it took a turn toward conservation and curtailing illegal logging (Vasile and Iordăchescu 2022). European policies influenced the development of domestic legal frameworks for forest protection, conservation, and commercial timber exploitation. Romania’s forests spread over 29 percent of the country’s territory, below the EU’s average, but are considered to be much more natural and biodiverse than most European forests (Albulescu et al. 2022), which have primarily been managed as monoculture plantations. Romanian forests are often mixed mountain forests, made of broad-leaved species beech and oak and coniferous spruce and fir. A close-to-nature management practice in Romanian forestry, especially since the 1980s, favored natural succession and long harvesting cycles. This policy and an underdeveloped network of logging roads infrastructure kept these forests more diverse and resilient than in other parts of Europe. Moreover, Romania still hosts a large percentage of Europe’s last remaining old-growth forests, which are undisturbed ecosystems recognized for their rich biodiversity and high carbon storage capacity (Veen et al. 2010). For this reason, they became relevant elements for climate mitigation and biodiversity targets across the region (Miu et al. 2020). They have also been important reservoirs, however, of capitalist extraction since the nineteenth century and a source of livelihood for mountain communities (see, e.g., Voicu and Vasile 2022). In the postsocialist period (since 1989), even though intensive, their commercial exploitation remained severely undercapitalized as businesses did not scale up their harvesting technologies or employment strategies, which in turn generated a pervasive gray economy and social vulnerability in the mountain areas. Processes characteristic of a timber frontier, including intensified unruly extraction that blurs the boundaries between law and theft, legitimate and illegitimate (as defined, e.g., by Tsing 2005), ensued after the collapse of socialism in 1989, driven by market liberalization and property restitution that resulted in more than half of former state forests returning to private individuals and communities (for an analysis of the Romanian timber frontier see Vasile 2020a). For more than a decade, local entrepreneurs drove forest extraction and independent timbermen became precarious waged laborers (Herţa 2016). As pressures from European market policies mounted, aligning with the spread of roaring conservation narratives, Romanian forestry underwent a transformation toward tightening control and command regulations—circumstances that led to the closing of the frontier moment (Scriban et al. 2019; Vasile and Iordăchescu 2022; for tightening regulation, see, e.g., Drăgoi and Toza 2019). Timber-related frictions mounted not only in Romania, but everywhere in Eastern Europe (see, e.g., Stahl 2010; Petrova 2014). Postsocialism has brought a pluralization of actors in the field of forestry. In Romania, in addition to the National Forest Service, private timber corporations, as well as conservation-related actors, such as environmental activists and journalists, have entered the scene, producing confrontations between divergent interests and forms of knowledge, triggering protests and law changes. Twenty years into postsocialism (roughly around 2010), environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and influential journalists started to fuel an unprecedented narrative of disastrous illegal logging, producing spectacularized forms of representation and datafication (Vasile and Iordăchescu 2022). An imagery of stumpscapes, eroded landscapes denuded of once secular trees, chainsaw buzz, and red-spotted maps of deforestation together with headlines of “millions of cubic meters of timer stolen every year,” assembled spectacular incarnations of the crisis and triggered public outcries to criminalize forest wrongdoers. Nevertheless, despite the increasingly restrictive legal framework, illegal logging continued to be perceived as a serious threat and drove the European Commission to take a stand against the Romanian government through repeated infringement actions.

In this article, we explore the nexus of criminalization and violence in the postsocialist forests of Romania. We understand violence as a broad process involving multiple forms, not only the physical violence that is usually deemed newsworthy (see Springer and Le Billon 2016). We focus primarily on the period since Romania became an EU member state, and transnational forms of conservation ensued, coinciding with the surge of a public forest crisis narrative and the emergence of a powerful rhetoric of illegal logging.

Our arguments in this article converge upon a clear-cut question: What are the pitfalls of fighting illegal logging with a legal framework that pursues criminal sanctioning? In response, we put forward a series of interconnected arguments. First, we argue that environmental criminalization is not a straightforward solution to a problem; instead, criminalization is an antagonistic complex process in itself that relates to a series of other processes, some of which might become criminal in their turn, such as collision or corruption. In this sense, drawing on ethnographic research, we show how criminalization produces an environment of secrecy, fear, and resentment, and weaves intricate patterns of blame among multiple villains—actors involved in different forest-related activities, as well as in governance and the judiciary process. This shapes a zone of conflict in which power struggles, and mechanisms related to politics of patronage determine who becomes criminalized. Moreover, we argue that expanding new laws, forms of policing, and prohibition lead to a proliferation of instances of illegality, which is in line with arguments put forward by environmental historian Jacoby (2014), who showed how creating new environmental laws means creating new criminals, transforming previously acceptable practices into illegal acts.

Second, we argue that criminalization has far-reaching social consequences, enhancing already-existing vulnerabilities. Our research supports the argument that tough-on-crime measures create ripe conditions for advancing social inequality and marginalization of already disenfranchised rural populations. More often than not, criminalization ends up targeting the most vulnerable “villains,” as the less vulnerable ones carve their way out, often in violent ways. This resonates with broader findings within the current criminalization turn, which show how the increased use of tough-on-crime policies in the global efforts to address biodiversity loss is detrimental to individuals, rural communities, and livelihoods, and ultimately ineffective in reducing the crime rate (e.g., Wilson and Boratto 2020; McSweeney 2023). We convey that in postsocialist Romania new forestry regulations have concentrated on what happens in the forest, thus addressing the production end of the forestry chain, meaning loggers and local management authorities such as foresters. It insufficiently addresses the more complex dynamics of trade, however, meaning what happens on the demand end of the commodity chain or at the policy end of forestry. This focus on crime in the forest affected rural livelihoods, but neither policymakers nor public voices have paid any attention to attend to systemic changes that affected forest-dependent communities.

Third, our main argument in this article is that classic approaches to tackling crime with legal repertoires, coercive and punitive in nature, had produced insidious as well as overt forms of violence. The Romanian national fury against forest criminals created a requisite emotional environment of anger and fear, which ultimately bred violence (as also shown in Vasile and Iordăchescu 2022). By looking at cases involving forest workers, small-scale timber businessmen, and foresters, we show how the process of criminalization, and the mere threat of it, trigger the escalation of violence. We argue that forest violence takes many forms apart from physical: psychological violence, intimidation or a climate of antagonism and anger, or structural violence (Peluso and Vandergeest 2020), which is similar to slow violence, as diminishing the survival base of local dwellers (Nixon 2013). We do not contend that law enforcement is unnecessary but aim to call attention to some of its unintended foul consequences, as they play out in the Romanian context.

Our arguments are in line with recent findings in the field of political ecologies of resource extraction and conservation. This literature shows that violence is often authorized by rapidly evolving legal frameworks that enable various actors within the enforcement chain to deploy or resist violence in the name of conservation (Massé 2020). A fixation on law enforcement usually casts aside alternative approaches that could address the underlying causes of forest destruction, becoming thus ineffective at extirpating the harmful practices, but, paradoxically, contributing to the preservation of a legal order that bolsters illicit economies and high-intensity violence (Grajales 2015). During the process of combating the forest offenses reframed as environmental crimes, the vulnerable ones tend to have their livelihoods criminalized (Cavanagh, Vedeld, and Trædal 2015) and are left with few possibilities to respond to forest-related violence, thereby perpetuating disempowerment (Grant and Le Billon 2021).

Moreover, our contextualization draws on a body of literature that has examined the sociohistorical contingencies of illegal logging. This research has shown how illegal logging emerges in a conjuncture of violent struggle, embedded within historical processes of expanding state power into remote forested territories. It is a somewhat ambiguous practice, as it is contingent on shifting legal frames across different historical periods and geographical areas. It is also contingent on contestation and negotiation between various groups of actors. Research shows that what governments deemed illegal logging, local residents often saw as social justice or traditional use (McElwee 2004; Stahl 2010; Sikor and To 2011; To and Mahanty 2019). In their attempt to centralize control and extraction of forests, state-led forestry has displaced local forest uses and disenfranchised rural populations across the globe. Jungles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America became synonymous with political violence in the name of making national forests (Peluso and Vandergeest 2011). It has been shown, though, that often illicit forest revenues are generated using state power and authority, state in this case translating into state actors, officials who often operate as rent-seekers (McCarthy 2002; Sikor and To 2011; Milne 2015; To 2015; Mahanty 2019).

Our research included extensive periods of ethnographic field work between 2004 and 2020 in various regions of the Romanian Carpathian Mountains and we bring insights from several communities for which illegal logging was an everyday reality. Moreover, we draw on long-term analysis of news media material by investigative journalists, published reports by governmental sources and NGOs, as well as nineteen in-depth interviews (conducted in 2019–2020) with foresters and rangers, forestry specialists, timber entrepreneurs and their employees, Members of Parliament, representatives of environmental NGOs, and investigative journalists. To understand changes in the legislation development between 2011 and 2020, we used follow-the-policy methods, as well as news media sources. To protect our respondents, we used pseudonyms throughout the article (unless drawing on publicly available sources).

The article is organized as follows. The next section introduces a series of ethnographic examples to illustrate forest-related vulnerabilities and violence, bringing into focus the actors affected by criminalization. In the third section, we contextualize the increase in criminalization and violence by revisiting the significant transformations of the Carpathian forests, focusing on the evolution of the legal framework and surveillance technologies. In this section, we also highlight the absence of social justice aspects in environmentalist discourses. Finally, we conclude that increased focus on law enforcement and criminalization creates further forms of violence and diverts attention from the underlying causes of forest destruction.

Vulnerability and Violence

In this section we focus on three categories of social actors inhabiting rural mountain areas that were affected by the new tough-on-crime regulations aimed at reducing illegal logging: forest workers, small-scale forestry businessmen, and lower ranking forestry officials. We show how after 2010, local timber entrepreneurs, as well as the entire web of laborers they had employed, found themselves strangled and criminalized by new sanctions, castigated by a raging public environmentalist outcry, which unfolded as a media spectacle deploying the imminent disappearance of the Carpathian forests evidenced by incriminating images of fresh stumps, piled logs, and loaded trucks. Intensely promoted by big green NGOs, livelihoods centered on ecotourism development as an alternative to timber extraction did not catch up across the area, and when they did, these operations were developed using capital from forestry operations (Dorondel 2016).

Petty Woodcutters, Vulnerable and Exploited

The first culprits of deforestation called out by the forest crisis narrative in the early 2000s were poor rural groups making a living through informal harvesting and selling of timber, doing back-breaking labor at the bottom of the commodity chain (Petrova 2014; Dorondel 2016). One such group were the Roma people, a historically landless ethnic minority, and the subgroup of the Rudari, who in several areas of the country have been used by powerful local actors (policemen, administration officials) as clear-cutters and scapegoats, as shown by the ethnographic case developed by Dorondel (2009, 2016). In the community he studied, the Rudari became entangled in patron–client relations with local foresters and business elites after forest privatization. Such relations granted them a livelihood but also exposed them as thieves. They illegally cut wood in forests restituted to their fellow Romanian villagers, forests with unclear administrative status. They were urged by their patrons, local mayors, and state foresters, who owned sawmills and needed the wood and the labor force. They allegedly were instructed not to touch the state forests, which were the foresters’ formal responsibility. While the local elite gained significant benefits from timber felling, their clients, the Rudari, were used as a cheap labor force, barely meeting their basic needs (Dorondel 2009). Furthermore, they also took the blame for the deforested hills, and triggered the hatred of the private owners who accused them of theft, going as far as saying “they should be killed” (Dorondel 2009, 52). Patronage appears to be a vital feature of frontier resource economies (Tsing 2005), and when coupled with state weakness, it can permeate systems of governance and regulation (Hudson 2020). Sporadically, political patronage also propelled a select few Roma to become middlemen, operating their own trucks and earning better incomes. Their entrepreneurial agency was limited, however, by the benevolence of timber barons and later constrained by the monopolistic policies of multinational companies. As in the case of many other rural poor elsewhere, Rudari were made even more vulnerable than they already were. This case shows how environmental racism merges with environmental harm during postsocialist land reforms, resulting in slow violence inflicted on the hypervisible Roma groups. In the process, practices of illegal logging and assigning blame have deepened historical forms of dispossession and created a climate of resentment.

These patterns of vulnerability can also be found in situations that do not involve ethnic minorities. In 2004, when local conflicts became rife at the peak of the timber rush, we encountered a case that sheds light on the complex facets of criminalization: a woodcutter, Ioan, who made a living for his family from small logging deals. With the approval of foresters and paying them a small steady rent, he hauled and transported logs with a cart and horses and sold them, either as firewood to fellow villagers or to the many sawmills filling the mountain valleys with buzz at the time. This remote community was a relatively large conglomerate of mountain villages, which had expanded at the beginning of the twentieth century in relation to the then capitalist timber industry, and to date, the only means of livelihood remains forestry. Most of Ioan’s forest deals were informal. One day, a control from a state institution came and his forester patron was found with a high number of illegal stumps. To escape a criminal conviction, the forester asked Ioan and the other woodcutters of the community to each take the guilt for cutting a small amount. Several years later, Ioan rebelled against the local forestry establishment together with other rightsholders to the local forest commons (which showed that actors such as Ioan had agency and resistance initiatives did exist, albeit easily repressed, as shown by Vasile 2019). To curb the protest and retaliate, the forester used the informal deals that he knew of, and filed suit against Ioan, who was sentenced to four years in prison, which left his family in dire circumstances. His informal dealings with the forester made him vulnerable, and his life was left exposed to the whims of his patron. At the time of our field work, Ioan’s prosecution stood in the community as an example of “punishing disobedience,” showing that in the gray zone, the powerful win the battle and can circumvent the law to their advantage.

These cases show how concealment of historical dependence on forests by local populations amounts to symbolic violence (as argued by Dutta 2020). They also reveal a series of complex implications of criminalization, which proves to be not a tool for the state to prevent and fight illegal logging, but a tool for the powerful to continue their illegal logging unhindered (as shown in a different context by McCarthy 2002), by scapegoating the “smaller fish.” Our research revealed, like in other cases worldwide that “enforcing the rule of law is difficult when patrimonial networks pervade the justice system and encourage corruption” (Grant and Le Billon 2021). A punitive and restrictive framework would tighten the necessity of “protection” (as in racketeering), and create an even greater demand for patronage relations, to access a resource made scarce, to prevent control, and to escape sanctions. In the case of criminalization, the complexities of patronage relations make it so that blame can be passed between the various actors involved as a result of power relations. Usually, the most vulnerable are the ones who fall prey. The threats of control and prosecution multiply instances for vulnerable people to take on guilt in exchange for petty rewards, and deepen the threats that keep criminal networks woven together. This case also shows how local resistance is limited, as potential rural voices are enmeshed in illicit dealings and victims of retaliation (Vasile 2019).

Small Entrepreneurs, Squeezed and Fearsome

Tomescu was the owner and manager of a small company that specialized in hauling and transporting logs while also being the priest of a community in the southern Carpathian Mountains. He started his business in 2005 with a minivan and soon was able to expand and buy a truck that could fit around twenty cubic meters of timber. According to new regulations, his company was supposed to record every timber transport and the corresponding volume in a government-owned database. The rules had been inconsistent in the past, so he kept recording in the accounts a significantly lower volume, usually two to three cubic meters, as if he was still operating with the minivan. Others in the village were buying and selling logs in a similar fashion, and the demand from the booming industry was high. One day, the authorities asked him to present the company’s documents, computers, and accounts to the fiscal office in the county’s capital, some seventy kilometers away. Knowing his papers were not in order and fearing a criminal conviction, while driving on a country road, he intentionally hit an electricity pole, set his car and himself on fire, and burned the contents of the vehicle to ashes (i.e., the evidence records required by the state institutions). During the incident, he suffered significant burns over parts of his body, including his face and head, ending up in a hospital for several days. Tomescu’s case is to some extent extreme, but we found similar situations either during field work or in the local press, which leads us to believe it to be a symptom of a more general pattern. This shows how the fear of prosecution translated into a form of psychological violence, an extreme anxiety that led to self-inflicted physical violence to avoid criminal prosecution.

Recent shifts toward increased bureaucratization and criminalization generated the shrinking of livelihoods dependent on forestry activities. Small timber entrepreneurs were squeezed out of business, and, as the case of Tomescu illustrates, sometimes this happened in violent ways. Many such businesses had been operating on the edge of legality, without keeping accurate accounts. The belief was widespread that one could not survive in the forestry business by doing everything clean. This illustrates both already classic analyses (Van Schendel and Abraham 2006) and more recent scholarship that show how the state is central in not only defining, but also in shaping and profiting from illicit activities with serious environmental consequences (Margulies, Massé, and VandeBerg 2023).

In the case of Romania, even activists fighting illegal logging acknowledged the fact that the state straitjackets the possibility of doing legal business: “We experimented with doing everything legal with one hundred cubic meters of wood at legal market prices. From a mathematical calculation you can already see that a businessperson loses money by doing everything legal,” were roughly their conclusions (Nedea and Muntean 2019). This is important because it highlights a this far unexplored (in Romania) avenue for deterring crime; that is, expanding the legal possibilities, creating sound policy for actors to develop legal forestry, as a way of mitigating conservation restrictions, instead of focusing only on control-and-punish policy. Such legal and sustainable forestry avenues that provision for the livelihoods of rural dwellers have been explored in the policies of other countries (see, e.g., Wong et al. 2020). Obviously, such policy is no magic bullet and comes with its own problems (see, e.g., Afroz, Cramb, and Grünbühel 2016); however, it would be important for policymakers at least to responsibly consider such possibilities.

On the national day of forests in 2017, the forestry industry representatives declared that their sector, despite being an important part of the national economy and providing labor relief, is in a situation of blockage:

The timber industry is one of our country’s few productive economic sectors. It contributes 3.5% of GDP, 128,000 direct jobs and other 186,000 jobs in related industries. It contributes labour relief in less developed areas by creating production units. An overdose of regulation and the overemphasis on control led to large blockages, with the consequence of a resource shortage that affects both the supply of firewood for the local population and the supply of material for the industry. (Fordaq Romania 2017)

Indeed, according to most our interviewees, the new legalistic and bureaucratic grip on forests, coupled with the world economic crisis (2008–2009), strangled the small-scale timber industry: the harvesting companies, as well as the manufacturing industry—sawmill owners and furniture factories located in rural areas. Only one in five sawmills survived, and as a consequence of a declining industry, Romania became primarily an importer of timber, not a producer (Fordaq Romania 2017). Some located the root of the deadlock in overbureaucratization. Entrepreneurs lamented that the Romanian forestry administration has twice as many employees as the European average. Moreover, twenty laws and no less than ninety-six ministerial decrees regulate timber operations, which increases the probability of running afoul of the law and the probabilities of forest-related white-collar crime.

A deep timber crisis affected the processing industry, and a large rural population dependent on firewood as the primary source of energy, after the government adopted tighter sanctions in the autumn of 2016 (Ordinance 51/2016). Several voices pointed out that a firewood crisis was unleashed by the reduction in illegal logging. For example, in a parliamentary debate, a former minister of forests, Doina Pană, said, “If the illegal logging disappeared, this means that millions of cubic meters of firewood disappeared as well.” ¹ Also, the source of firewood shortage and skyrocketing prices was located in a wider resource crisis, which meant that large corporate timber processors swallowed all available timber, offering high prices for what used to be cheap firewood available for laypeople. Several actors interviewed located the source of the resource crisis in the dynamics between the large players (with a tinge of illicit collusion): timber corporations and the National Forest Service (managing more than half of Romania’s forests), the latter being interested in supplying exclusively the former, thus making timber unavailable for any others. In 2016, a protest by representatives of the small and midsize forestry companies highlighted such arguments. The press covering the event wrote, “Owners of small and midsize companies lament they risk bankruptcy. They accuse that the National Forest Service is stacking the odds in favour of the Austrian company … , which dominates the market” (Marin 2016).

In Romania, as in several other postsocialist countries, firewood is the primary energy source for rural communities, which amounts to half of the country’s population. These dynamics have created a firewood crisis, pushing energy poverty as the most common instance of everyday violence in the region. The negative effects were felt more acutely by those groups with no or restricted access to the forests, including communities in agricultural areas and some Roma minority communities. When the firewood crisis hit, the government’s only measures to patch a broken system were to offer state subsidies (through the local authorities) for purchasing firewood to the most vulnerable consumers, and to increase the amount of firewood for household consumption available for sale through the local forestry districts (under the authority of the National Forest Service). This was far from addressing the causes of the problem, however: The crisis had deeper roots in recent changes of the political economy of forests—that is, market supply and prices, triggered by increased law enforcement mechanisms, notably criminalization.

How did this situation fit in the longer trajectory of Romanian forest-related processes? The crash and collapse framed as blockage and crisis came as a shift from a previously favorable postsocialist situation for the timber business, fueled by a construction industry boom in the 1990s, which triggered the flourishing of a small-scale timber industry in the 2000s (Herţa 2016; Vasile 2019, 2020a). During this previous period, several entrepreneurs accumulated capital and rode the waves of profitable investments, enabling new trajectories of extraction and timber politics. These timber barons amassed wealth in money and dependent people and formed small mafias, controlling fiefdom forests (Vasile 2019, 2020b). The other side of the coin was the formation of a new class of small businessmen, independent timbermen, trying to make do, as the aforementioned priest Tomescu, as well as a class of precarious forest workers and petty woodcutters.

From a high frontier moment that seemed to obey the slogan “anything goes,” after 2010, business, big and small, had become much more professionalized, regulated, and competitive. Because parts of these economies operate informally, it is difficult to estimate how many families or people have been involved and still are in mountain forestry. For this lack of quantitative data, the actual magnitude of social impact remains invisible for policymaking.

Foresters, Blamed and Tarnished

In the early days of autumn 2019, the murder of forester Liviu Pop in northern Romania (introduced at the beginning of the article) shook up national and international publics, exposing foresters as victims of violence and as forest defenders. Only days after this incident, another young Romanian forester was assaulted and threatened, in a case that seemed more convoluted in discerning forest defenders from destroyers. He featured in a journalistic documentary that investigated forest crimes, which was broadcast nationally and created social unrest (Nedea and Muntean 2019). In the documentary, he was put on the spot by journalists to explain alleged illegal logging by reckless entrepreneurs in the canton under his jurisdiction. In Romania, the foresters (pădurari) are a traditional body of professionals working at different hierarchical levels within the National Forest Service, or more recently within independent private forestry districts (ocoale de regim), and their responsibilities broadly include management and guarding of forests for economic or conservation purposes. They are therefore law enforcers, petty environmental sovereigns meant to enforce the law on the ground and wielding legal authority (Massé 2022).²

The journalists suggested the young forester was complicit in illegal business, but also hinted that theft is in fact propagated by chains of perpetrators, including mayors, politicians, and the “highest level of the state.” In this narrative, the young forester was portrayed only as a small fish who executes his superiors’ orders. In the documentary, the forester shrugged his shoulders and explained that the trees were marked for harvesting according to a management plan, and thus everything was alright from his point of view. The journalists, however, investigated further why healthy trees were marked as salvage harvesting following wind throw, which should have targeted only sick or damaged trees. The allegations of corruption presented in the documentary forced the central authorities to send the control officers to investigate the activity of several forestry offices in the area, provoking anxiety and confusion among the regional officials accused (Nedea and Muntean 2019). The journalists’ investigation unleashed a complex succession of overt violent actions—threats and beatings. The young forester had discovered that his superiors were accomplices in the unlawful activities and even falsified his signature on various documents; he called on the police to investigate. On the other hand, his superiors were trying to blame him for irregularities. The forester’s boss was forced to resign by the management of the National Forest Service. This action bothered the timber clans of the area, which further led them to threaten and assault the disloyal young forester, who appeared in the news with his face covered in blood (Nedea 2019). He was the seventh forester suffering violent abuse in less than a month across the country. One year later, the father of the young forester, who was himself a forester within the same district, nearing retirement age, was beaten up by his colleagues, who blamed his son for stirring up the waters and shrinking their opportunities for illicit gain. Following this event, which was picked up by the press, the father was apparently forced to sign a declaration that he was not beaten but fell from a wagon, suggesting the existence of a culture of secrecy enforced through violent means.

This case was complex, replete with physical violence, threats, and intimidation, with multiple actors involved, nuances and turns. Significant for our argument here is that the process of sanctioning and criminalizing was not a straightforward exposure and punishment of crime, but unfolded into intricate unforeseeable actions, including passing blame and private forms of silencing and punishment. Foresters appeared as a divided group: on the one hand as victims, on the other hand as abusers, operating hand-in-hand with reckless businessmen. In this situation, the higher-up forestry officials also put forward a set of incoherent actions: They discharged offenders from among their ranks but at the same time attempted to hush the victims of foresters’ abuse. Foresters feared control and prosecution and exposed confidence that they would be protected and their cases stifled. The heterogeneity of state actors involved in forestry becomes clear here; they are part of institutions that are supposed to hold up law enforcement, but in fact their actions are much more complex, calling attention again that sanctioning and criminalization are not straightforward applied solutions but processes that unfold in unpredictable ways.

The public exposure of alleged crime is also important here. The media dimension, or its mere threat, produced by journalists and activists, had a role in how the events unfolded. The fear of exposure forced the National Forest Service officials to operate the dismissals, and also to attempt to sweep under the carpet the violence of foresters against their elderly colleagues. As scandals of corruption and illegality made daily appearances in the media, the image of the National Forestry Service was largely tarnished over the last decade, entering what some of our interviewees called “a moral crisis.”

This case also supports the argument that investigations and criminalization unleashed unprecedented violence in forest-dependent areas. We showed how criminalization can expose foresters to multiple forms of violence at once—from murder as the most extreme physical form, to threats of prosecution, forgery, and slander, even as perpetrators of such violence can be from among their own colleagues. Recent scholarship discussing the role of local rangers in forest protection and conservation has brought to light the vulnerable position these actors usually hold (Dutta 2020). The Romanian case, however, reveals a more ambiguous position. In the empirical cases presented, foresters appeared as complicit in illegal logging and over the years such rotten alliances had become commonplace, exposed by multiple investigations. This complicity was not ubiquitous, though. Among foresters there were ranks, as well as different patterns of action. Indeed, over time, the role of Romanian foresters had become ambivalent. The National Forest Service was once, during state socialism, the administrator and extractor of all Romanian forests. After the collapse of socialism, its powers diminished considerably under the pressure of privatizations, in which half of the forestlands passed into private ownership and administration. The mammoth institution of the National Forest Service lost much of its power base and starting with 2004, private forestry districts were formed to manage the privatized forests (Ioras and Abrudan 2006). The National Forest Service, a state company, nevertheless remained an important forest administrator and timber supplier. Yet, in rural mountain areas, its role, deployed through local forestry districts in charge of managing local forests, became a twisted one: It retained the authority of state-led scientific forestry expertise, but it acquired an image of a corrupt clique of officials. Overall, the Forest Service could be seen as undergoing a crisis, trying to maintain the power it once had under obviously diminished circumstances, with methods pertaining to a patrimonialist order, which recently had come under intense contestation. Studies showed that both the foresters who have made the shift to the private system and those who have remained within the Forest Service found recent changes traumatic, “unsettling and challenging to their values and work ethos,” lamenting increased levels of stress and insecurity (Lawrence and Szabo 2005). While being on the frontline of forest management, foresters often found themselves in conflicting positions enmeshed in a rigid vertical powerful system that maintained their vulnerability.

Even though foresters could retain legitimacy broadly and oppose the advance of conservation in other Eastern European contexts (Blavascunas 2020), in Romania, they were mostly seen as part of a system that facilitated the proliferation of illicit practices related to the timber economy. The role of foresters in bringing forward a criminalization-led approach for forest protection was complex. Even if they repeatedly decried the overregulation of forest exploitation, they also seized the criminalization tendency and demanded firearms and special equipment to fight off crime.

The violent situations that we examined in these empirical cases were known to the Romanian public, but they were never framed by the media as systemic consequences of recent shifts, such as an increase in vulnerability and a toxic and fearful environment triggered by heightened restrictions and criminalization. Such acts were framed in public discourse mainly as individual malice and voraciousness of rural mobsters, reckless businessmen, evil officials, and backward poor (Vasile and Iordăchescu 2022).

Taken together, these empirical cases testify to the linkages between illegal logging, increasing punitive sanctions, and the proliferation of various forms of violence. They also show that criminalization of illicit activities and punitive sanctioning are deeply connected to local power dynamics. When threats of criminalization become acute, the powerful use the legalistic turn to their advantage, deepening inequalities and subordination. As a direct consequence of postsocialist processes of power restructuring, the changing legal frameworks do not only create gray areas for businesses to operate, but become self-standing instruments of control and punishment of betrayal within illicit activities. Thus, the increase of the control and punishment apparatus can have the perverse effect of hindering the detection and prosecution of crime, as “criminals” become more aware, more afraid, and thus tighten fear-based gang means of securing loyalty and deterring disobedience. These defense mechanisms against criminalization can inadvertently become forms of crime, namely corruption or collision, which are not conducive to sound and transparent forest conservation practice.

Unpacking the Criminalization–Social Vulnerability–Violence Nexus

In this section, we situate the previous cases in the larger landscape of social, economic, and political shifts of the last decades, in an attempt to track the underlying mechanisms through which increasing criminalization leads to recombinant forms of social vulnerability and violence.

In 2009, an MP, representative of the Apuseni Mountains, renowned to the Romanians as an area where people make a living from the forest (see Vasile 2020a), gave a storming speech in the parliament in defense of the small-scale independent timberman, highlighting the social vulnerability of mountain dwellers:

Those who live in the mountains from processing and selling wood, from herding cattle and growing potatoes, are an important part of the Romanian nation. They have the least fertile land and have to battle harsh weather and long distances. … The Romanian Carpathians have the highest degree of poverty among the mountain populations across Europe[.] After 1989, the mountain people gained the liberty of speech. Still, they lost other important things, as most jobs are gone, in mining, in the industry[.] A critical blow came in the last years from the forestry legislation promoted by the Romanian state. The Forest Code from 2008 prohibits forest harvesting by private persons, allowing only registered companies that own superior technologies for … destroying the forests!³

The MP defended the interests of the people who voted for him. He spoke against restrictive legislation, against wood tracking technologies, against greedy profiteer corporations hand-in-hand with state representatives encroaching on local woodcutters. He talked about the forest as a subsistence resource for its inhabitants, who have limited sources for livelihood. Later in the speech, he exposed how mountain dwellers have been straitjacketed by bureaucratic law, which can lead to losing a centuries-old economy. The MP was one of the few public figures who spoke in defense of social justice in forestry, exposing the grievances of his people. What we want to emphasize here, however, is that his speech was an exception. The vulnerabilities he exposed (i.e., the social justice element) has been glaringly absent from most other public and policy agendas concerning Romania’s forests. This is, we think, a missed opportunity, because favorable premises exist in the country for forest economies to sustain local livelihoods, notably collective property arrangements that exist in several Carpathian areas granting forest rights to commoners (see, e.g., Vasile 2019; Opincaru 2021; Iordăchescu 2022). In the following subsections, we trace and expand on the elements signaled in the preceding speech, examining the historical roots that underpin the proliferation of criminalization, as well as on the process of overregulation.

Historical Roots

First, to understand the roots of the current developments, we situate forestry practices starting some seventy years before the present. During the years of dictatorial socialist rule (1948–1989), Romania’s forests were owned, managed, and extracted by the state in a centralized national economy. For example, according to the Forestry Code of 1962, all forests were to be managed uniformly, and the principle of sustained timber yield production was central. Prodigious levels of production, obsessive forest planning (Munteanu et al. 2016), and armies of foresters and waged laborers embodied the socialist political forests. The state employed local residents, their timber consumption was regulated and approved by officials, and timber commerce (as any private commerce) was strictly prohibited. Yet, under the iron-clad surface of law and order, many irregularities usually happened with the authorities’ knowledge, who either turned a blind eye or shared the illicit profits (Vasile 2020a).

In the 1990s, with the collapse of state socialist rule, a timber rush swept over the Carpathian Mountains. State forestry enterprises were privatized or abandoned, and employees were laid off. Half of the forest surface was privatized with three successive laws (in 1991, 2000, and 2005). Forest restitution is still an ongoing process; currently, the state owns 48.8 percent of forests, private owners own 33.8 percent (commons owned collectively by village groups are also included here), and the rest is under private or public ownership of local municipalities (Institutul Naţional de Statistică 2020). During the timber boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, a rural timber industry emerged, using a precarious workforce, sometimes under informal arrangements (Herţa 2016). The boom and bust of this postsocialist timber frontier influenced the livelihoods of rural population in disproportionate ways across the Romanian Carpathians. For example, in the western part of the country, a household timber economy initially replaced state-planned forestry and allowed small-scale timbermen to flourish (Vasile 2020a), whereas in the center-south and eastern regions, an elite group of timber barons (Vasile 2019) held a tight grip on the forestry-related livelihoods by consolidating their political power (Dorondel 2016). All over the country, economic polarization grew between timber companies that became larger and the rest who stayed small.

Such polarization maintained precarity as the local economies tried to survive in an ever more competitive environment. Along with low wages, machinery in poor condition and inadequate protective equipment kept logging laborers in a constant situation of vulnerability (we encountered multiple cases of uninsured forest workers losing their lives in work accidents), a situation mirrored by the predicament of the lowest ranked foresters. As the timber frontier went from boom to bust, both professional categories experienced recombinant forms of slow and everyday violence with occasional outbursts of physical violence in the form of beatings, arson, and killings, the cases recounted in the previous sections testifying to these processes.

The decade from 1991 to 2000 in Romania illustrates the political frontier described by Watts (2018), in which a collapsed authority gives way to legal chaos—“disorderly and often violent forms of rule associated with unreliable and partisan legal orders, unaccountable forms of state governance, and ineffective forms of public authority” (478). In this first postsocialist decade, illegal logging was mainly seen as minor theft done by the poor, with a horse and a cart, in newly privatized forests (Bouriaud 2005). Powerless state foresters lamented not having the legal instruments to criminalize such theft. In fact, it was sometimes state foresters themselves who patronized and directed illegal logging in these private areas. Foresters (i.e., the accusers) would later become themselves the target of such illegal logging accusations, eroding further their power base and social legitimacy. During this time, as Verdery (2003) observed, the political field became “fragmented, with groups and individuals constantly shifting sides, coalitions, and party identities” (112). Forests became a political issue, subject to accusations and counteraccusations between various regional factions. The state was, in the words of Verdery (2003), “weakened by parasitism, barely controlled lawlessness, and scavenging on the part of virtually everyone” (113).

As the 2000s came to an end, the timber boom wound down, stifled by the world economic crisis and increasing regulation. Into the 2010s, narratives against illegal logging escalated and regulations shifted, favoring a conservation agenda. These transformations were kindled by international commitments and pressures, mainly from the EU, as Romania became a member state in 2007, to advance stricter forms of nature protection in an attempt to halt biodiversity loss and reach climate mitigation targets. Illegal logging and deforestation emerged as the biggest threat to biodiversity and local economies throughout the Danube-Carpathian region (Schlingemann et al. 2017). As conservation increasingly became the hegemonic paradigm, forest control legislation and enforcement institutions grew more powerful. Local dwellers were criminalized as poachers and lawless woodcutters. New actors entered the scene: journalists and conservationists deploring the high deforestation rates, demanding increased sanctions and punishment.

The actual dimension of forest loss was acutely disputed, however, and not all concerned actors agreed that a deforestation crisis existed. Various datafication processes emerged, as well as their contestation (Vasile and Iordăchescu 2022). For almost a decade, new reports by NGOs or independent media brought forward figures about forest loss, amplifying the narrative of forest crisis (Vasile and Iordăchescu 2022). A report of the Court of Accounts stated that the country lost “80 million cubic meters of timber to illegal logging” (Curtea de Conturi 2013), and the Ministry of Forests and Waters hastily admitted in 2018 that “over 20 million cubic meters are cut illegally each year” (Ministerul Apelor si Padurilor 2018). The sound of “millions” was alarming, but not everybody agreed on what that actually meant. Forestry scholars showed that the forested surface of Romania was actually on the rise, and drew attention to the fact that the word deforestation was used abusively in conservation rhetorics, as the term defines a process whereby the land is converted permanently to another use (e.g., agriculture), but in Romania the usual case was that the harvested areas would in fact regrow forests (e.g., Palaghianu and Nichiforel 2016). They showed that the colossal numerical figures of forest loss were scaremongering and erroneous, and their interpretation had to be contexualized. Such contestations of the data called into question the primary reasons for increasing criminalization and sanctions. Nevertheless, politicians and civil society leaders used such data as ammunition, in populist rhetoric fixated on calling for more sanctions, meant to increase their legitimacy and appeal. Moreover, the public outcry around these figures pushed the European Commission to launch an infringement procedure against the Romanian government in February 2020 for violating several pieces of environmental legislation including the Habitats Directive.

Overregulation

To understand how framing forest wrongdoing as crime triggered the proliferation of violence, it is essential to look at the unsteadiness of legal frameworks related to forestry and forest protection. In many Eastern European countries, postsocialist transformations involved frequent and sometimes unexpected changes in the legal frameworks regulating forest protection and timber harvesting (Blavascunas 2020).

As Romania entered the European common market in 2007, new regulatory frameworks for timber products came into force to prevent illegally sourced timber from entering the supply chains (MO 583 of 15 September 2008). Besides setting clear obligations for operators, the regulation was meant to aid control officers in their actions against illegal logging (Art.2, c). EU regulations also contributed to increased politicization, however (Davidescu and Buzogany 2021). Around the same time, the most important Romanian postsocialist Forest Code came into force in 2008, after years of heated debates. This Forest Code went through numerous changes, though, especially after 2012, in four successive significant amendments by changing governments—in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018—reflecting a political inconsistency that translated into economic instability for forestry operators (Fordaq Romania 2017; Drăgoi and Toza 2019). By 2012, proposing more ever harsher sanctions to fight illegal logging had become electoral ammunition. It was not only the laws that shifted constantly, either; the control institutions were reshuffled almost every two years (Davidescu and Buzogany 2021). For example, the Forestry Guard, an essential forest control institution (in charge of legality control, supervising reforestation works financed by the public budget, checking and approving the forest management plans), was reorganized several times, most recently in July 2021. Scholars who analyze forest policy have pointed to daunting command-and-control overregulation that crept up as the 2010s advanced (Buliga and Nichiforel 2019; Drăgoi and Toza 2019; Scriban et al. 2019). Moreover, levels of criminalization of forest wrongdoers reached unprecedented levels as illegal logging became officially listed as a threat to national security in 2016. So did the amount of paperwork necessary for forestry operations. Strikingly, nearly nobody discussing such legal changes addressed social justice consequences generated by acute conflicts. Seen as forest destroyers—rural residents, petty loggers, workers—the “weakest” foresters and entrepreneurs, despite being on the order of hundreds of thousands and rendered precarious by recent transformations, did not have a place at the table of lawmaking.

The immediate results of evolving legislation toward increased criminalization reverberated throughout the entire timber economy, creating a deadlock. This pushed small manufacturers out of business and deepened the vulnerability of rural communities whose livelihoods were centered around forest extraction. For forestry operators, overregulation, amounting to an incoherent patchwork, made real-life situations complicated from a legal point of view, and ultimately made mistakes possible and probable. This meant that people involved in forestry were exposed to criminalization more than ever. To keep things going and continue doing their job, loggers and foresters in the field operated at the edges of legality, always in danger of stepping outside the law.

Overregulation and tough-on-crime measures also meant that threats with control or criminalization became more frequent. In other words, the law became a weapon. It was not only a weapon wielded by the righteous against the criminals, though. More often than not, as the empirical cases in the previous sections have shown, it was a weapon wielded in competition or power struggles among those equally engaged in criminal activities. In this context, as the risk of prosecution loomed large, the value of political protection increased. Patron–client relationships in forestry became even more crucial than before, to prevent control, deter punishment, and influence inspectors and courts of law, and therefore patrons could afford to become more demanding. All of this in the context of increased political battles and factionalism was a recipe for recklessness and escalation of violence.

Surveillance technologies focused on forest harvesting and transport also emerged to play an important role in law enforcement, adding a public dimension to criminalization. In 2016, a new mobile application offered the general public the possibility to use the government-owned platform for timber traceability for monitoring and reporting timber transports that seemed suspicious. Citizens became embroiled in criminalization similarly to vigilante groups. Other smart technologies focused on the forest area such as closed-circuit television and remote sensing soon followed suit, in parallel with a surge in civil society mobilization on social media (e.g., petitioning, open letters to policymakers), contributing to an increase in the visibility of timber harvesting and trade, be it legal or illegal. The wide use of these technologies created an environment of fear and reciprocal policing, imbricated into the deepest layers of community relations, leading to a radical polarization and ultimately enabling the proliferation of violence.

In parallel, this popular mobilization for forest protection coalesced into a country-wide movement that demanded tighter regulations, a switch from civil to criminal sanctions, and a moratorium on logging or lumber exports (see also Davidescu and Buzogany 2021). Controversy ensued regarding the effectiveness of citizen surveillance technologies. The timber industry representatives lamented to the press that such systems are not effective: “The impact of countering illegal logging is not significant, the only thing that is generated is a national hysteria and a witch hunt” (Forcoș 2019). A Greenpeace report from 2017, however, estimated that citizen reports led to 20 percent of prosecution cases yearly. Some of our interviewees considered that illegal logging was significantly reduced because of it.

In short, the constantly evolving legislation and policing technologies not only created an unstable economic environment for forestry businesses to operate, but it also put them under constant scrutiny, subjected to public monitoring. As various practices could potentially become illegal in a short period by the power of a hasty amendment to the Forestry Code or an emergency ministerial ordinance bypassing democratic deliberation in the parliament, many actors involved in forestry operations were publicly exposed, rightfully or not, as criminals, vicious and lawless. Although the line between legality and illegality was fragile and constantly shifting, triggering prompt reactions from the public, violence morphed into new forms at accelerated rates, as shown by the empirical cases presented earlier.

To sum up, this section reveals that while pursuing the punishment of forest offenses with new legal and technological means, the underlying causes of forest destruction were overlooked. New forms of violence emerged and combined, affecting disproportionately the various categories of actors involved in the forest economy. The vulnerable petty woodcutters suffered exploitation within patron–client relations that resulted in class or racial inequalities, and small entrepreneurs experienced marginalization, precarity, and psychological violence due to an insecure economic environment. Largely blamed for the forest destruction, the foresters witnessed the broadest range of violent outbursts, from threats and employment insecurity to extreme forms of physical violence such as arson and murder. Therefore, the proliferation of violence runs alongside rapidly changing forest-related legislation and is dependent on the historical evolution of power relations inside the forest economy.

Conclusions

In this article, we unpacked the transformations of the Romanian political forests in the last three decades, which went from extractive forests to conservation forests. We argued that the vulnerabilities created by illegal logging practices were deepened by criminalization, which led to increasing violence. With few exceptions (Vasile 2019), the violent dimensions of these transformations have not been tackled by scholarly literature, and have been the exclusive domain of journalistic reports, documentaries, and spectacular news coverage. The more diffuse types of violence, namely the social vulnerability of communities rendered precarious during these processes, were often hinted at by various actors, but no actual policy has consistently addressed such grievances. These social dimensions remained a blind spot in the narratives of illegal logging produced by both camps—conservationists and the forestry community. The offensive against illegal logging was advanced with middle-class environmentalist arguments, such as defending charismatic nature from impending environmental disasters (Iordăchescu 2021), which were more concerned with punishing the culprits than addressing the underlying problems that create illegal logging in the first place. Tough-on-crime measures and, more broadly, an increase in criminalization, were fueled by attempts of political parties to build a veneer of legitimacy and accountability, oriented both toward European institutions and internal voters. Criminalization and prosecution were not merely matters of law enforcement, though; instead they were productive of various forms of violence in the forested areas through which the authority of state officials was actively produced, not only as governors, but also as private protectors against prosecution, akin to racketeers, thereby exacerbating the underlying tensions.

The types of violence that have proliferated recently in Romanian forests were (1) systemic violence, akin to slow violence—in which rural populations are dispossessed of their means of livelihood; (2) a form of psychological violence, the constant fear and threat of prosecution that affects loggers and foresters, escalated by shifting legal boundaries, as well as omnipresent media rage, and the presence of community vigilantism; (3) firings and prosecution of disobedient clients, which persists within networks of patronage; and (4) the newsworthy type of physical violence, which includes verbal and bodily assaults, beatings, and ultimately murders. We analyzed empirical examples that revealed how petty woodcutters lost their livelihoods or were prosecuted and put in jail. Many local businesses went bankrupt, squeezed out by market- and legislation-related processes, in which rural jobs were lost, and rural folk were pushed to join the ranks of European emigrants to Western countries. Small-scale entrepreneurs set themselves on fire to escape prosecution. The weakest of the foresters, fearing to become the scapegoats of their bosses, chose to speak up, and thus they and their families became victims of violent retaliation. Yet others were murdered by thuggish loggers fearing prosecution. What favored such escalations was a general climate of fear—threats, sanctions, criminalization, and a raging hysterical discourse against illegal logging perpetrated by conservationists and populist politicians.

A rapidly changing forest-related legislation hampered the political positioning of the actors involved in forestry at lower ranks. Local businessmen did not want to raise their voice to avoid becoming targets, and the rural folk working in the forest did not possess a united resistance voice, being themselves enmeshed in various shady networks.

We finally argued that increasing environmental criminalization created a zone of conflicts and tensions in which the vulnerable fall prey and the strongest survive, therefore perpetuating the same power dynamics that generate patronage relations and create the environmental harm in the first place. Criminalization provided the grounds for political actors to use accusations of illegal logging and tough-on-crime rhetoric as political ammunition in electoral battles. This mounting focus on law enforcement concentrated on punishing the vulnerable villains who became scapegoats, while the underlying causes of illegal logging remained off the conservation agenda. Far from being a solved riddle, the pursuit of forest protection in the Romanian Carpathians through cutting-edge criminal law instruments constitutes the root of proliferating forms of violence. In the meantime, as these valuable forests become the object of desire for various EU strategies and plans for economic recovery, they remain forests of fear for the vulnerable ones whose livelihoods are marred by the power of law.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, whose advice helped us refine and strengthen the argument. An early version of this article was presented at the Illicit Geography and Environmental Change Workshop organized by Jared Margulies, Brittany Gilmer, and Francis Massé in October 2020, and we are grateful for having received consistent feedback from all participants. Special thanks to Arryn Snowball for careful editing of the final draft and relentless support.

Additional information

Funding

Part of this work was supported by the European Research Council-funded grant Biodiversity and Security: Understanding Environmental Crime, Illegal Wildlife Trade and Threat Finance (#694995).

Notes on contributors

George Iordăchescu

GEORGE IORDĂCHESCU is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the project Beastly Business: Examining the Illegal Wildlife Trade in Europe hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 1AJ, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include political ecology of conservation, the governance of nature protection regimes in the European Union, environmental crime, and environmental politics in Europe.

Monica Vasile

MONICA VASILE works on the global history of reintroducing endangered species, as part of the research group Moving Animals: A History of Science, Media and Policy in the 20th Century in the Department of History, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Limburg 6211 SZ, Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include history of science and wildlife conservation, human–animal relations, rewilding, and the revival of forest commons in the Carpathian Mountains.

Notes

1 MP Doina Pană in the plenary meeting of the Second Chamber of Parliament, October 2018.

2 In Romania, foresters are different from rangers, who are law enforcers within conservation areas (i.e., national parks). The rangers form a new profession that emerged in the last two decades as protected areas were increasingly established. They are part of national parks’ guarding apparatus, or working for other nonpublic actors involved in nature conservation. Lawrence and Szabo (2005) offered a detailed account of foresters’ professionalization during postsocialism by exploring how foresters’ identity, role, and legitimacy is constructed as expertise in Romania.

3 MP Cornel Olaru in the plenary meeting of the Second Chamber of Parliament, April 2009.