Paper short abstract:

Rudňany, is a former mining town with the impoverished Roma ethnic groups bearing an uneven burden of the adverse environmental impacts of industrial activity. The paper outlines a pattern of the Roma marginalization against the background of the processes of economic restructuring in the 1990s.

Paper long abstract:

Rudňany, a former mining town in eastern Slovakia, is a case of environmental injustice, with the impoverished Roma ethnic groups bearing an uneven burden of the adverse environmental impacts of industrial activity. The greatest development of Rudňany took place after 1945, when a new industrial plant for the processing of complex iron ores was built here. The town experienced a dramatic economic decline after 1990 as a result of economic restructuring after the fall of socialist regime. Nowadays, a group of approximately two thousand ethnic Roma live in substandard conditions in shacks located on the outskirts of the town, on the sites of former mining tunnels, where they are threatened by landslides and contamination by toxic waste, from mining waste heaps that surround one of the Roma settlements.

In this paper, based on combination of research methods (archives and ethnographic field research), we examine historical economic and political context that has resulted in uneven distribution of environmental harms. We study interethnic relations and the power asymmetries that have shaped the lives of Roma in the village. We were interested particularly in access to decision-making and the copying strategies of the local Roma. The paper concludes with outlining of a more general pattern of the Roma marginalization against the background of the processes of economic restructuring that led to the decline of former mining towns in eastern Slovakia in the 1990s.