Toxic citizenship: Environmental racism and bureaucratic erasure in Roma Gârcini,Romania

Abstract

This article develops the concept of toxic citizenship to explain how environmental injustice is politically produced through the differential enactment of citizenship itself. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Roma community of Gârcini, Romania, the analysis shows how formal citizenship can coexist with systematic exposure to environmental harm when legal recognition, infrastructure, and state protection are selectively suspended. Residents of Gârcini live adjacent to toxic waste sites and in conditions of severe infrastructural neglect, not because they fall outside the state, but because they are governed through bureaucratic erasure, most notably the denial of identity documents, property registration, and access to basic public services. Toxic citizenship names this mode of governance, not unique to this setting, in which citizens are rendered administratively illegible while remaining politically accountable, producing a condition of normalized exposure to toxicity and slow deterioration of life. Drawing on theories of slow violence, necropolitics, racialized infrastructure, and survival in damaged landscapes, the article demonstrates how environmental harm in Gârcini is not an unintended policy failure but a political outcome of racialized citizenship practices. By centering toxic citizenship as an analytic concept, the article reframes environmental injustice as a problem internal to citizenship rather than external to it, showing how states can govern marginalized populations through sustained exposure to harm while maintaining the formal language of rights and inclusion. The concept offers a framework for understanding environmental injustice as a structural condition of contemporary governance, with implications beyond the Romanian context.