Paper Short Abstract:

Looking at instances of land grabbing in Romania, the paper engages with Feminist Political Ecology to unravel the micro-politics of land dispossession. The analysis highlights how local land grabbers, leveraging their proximity and embeddedness within the community, engage in the process of dispossession that unfolds through slow violence.

Paper Abstract:

Land grabbing has been at the core of many recent debates, as the wave of large-scale land acquisitions continues to reshape rural landscapes, disrupt traditional livelihoods, and exacerbate social and environmental harms. Although more and more research emerges on the many consequences of land grabbing, most studies tend to focus on overt conflicts and highly visible cases, defined by their scale and immediate effects. Yet, less sensational instances remain overlooked, and the gradual process in which dispossession takes place remains invisible. Using a qualitative methodology, this research is grounded in two case studies conducted in two regions of Transylvania. The empirical focus is placed on post-socialist Romania, the EU country with the highest number of peasants, despite land grabbing drastically increasing in the last decade. Drawing on interviews with activists, local authorities and peasants, the paper seeks to answer the question: How do peasants experience dispossession? The focus is placed on the forms of violence that emerge in the process, considering the role that gender, age, and class play in these conflicts.

The paper engages with Feminist Political Ecology and Emotional Geographies to unravel the micro-politics of land dispossession. The analysis highlights how local land grabbers, leveraging their proximity and embeddedness within the community, engage in the process of dispossession that unfolds through slow violence. The findings suggest that land grabbers exploit the emotional attachment of people to their land as well as their vulnerabilities in order to secure control over the land.