Markus Kröger

This article examines the ethical and legal dimensions of corporate land grabbing in Bahia, Brazil, focusing on the forestry sector’s use of fraud, legal manipulation, and violence to acquire land. Through a case study of Veracel Celulose, a joint venture between the Swedish-Finnish corporation Stora Enso and the Brazilian company Suzano, we analyze how corporations exploit legal ambiguity and manipulate land registries to dispossess local populations. Drawing on archival data from federal and state land governance institutions, we develop the concept of corporate (il)legal enclosure, defined as the process through which corporations transform contested, public, or informally held land into de facto corporate property by mobilizing intertwined legal and illegal practices that exclude local populations from access, use, and control over land. Our findings show how title forgery, cadastral manipulation, administrative procedures, and legal regularization operate together to convert fraudulent land claims into seemingly legitimate corporate property. We demonstrate that land grabbing increasingly occurs not only through violence or outright illegality, but through the strategic mobilization of legal and bureaucratic institutions that render dispossession lawful in practice. By integrating insights from agrarian studies, sociolegal scholarship, and business ethics, the article advances a contextually grounded understanding of land-based injustice and challenges compliance-oriented approaches to business ethics. In doing so, it highlights the need for business ethics scholarship to engage more directly with the role of law in enabling and legitimizing corporate dispossession.

This article explores the ways that illegal land grabbing has taken place in contemporary Brazil since 2003. The findings suggest that much more attention needs to be paid to the various forms of violent illegalities behind the creation of land control, in both urban and rural contexts. The role of land mafias as a key political-economic sector creating capital through land speculation should be investigated further, as it seems to matter even more than de jure land rights. The article studies how, where, and why land mafias – often an amalgamation of rural elites, police, and governmental and judicial powerholders – have surged. It uses longitudinal ethnography to explore the widespread expulsion of people from their land in the Brazilian Amazon after the 2003 installation of a Cargill soybean export mill. This has led to the radical transformation of vast forest and urban areas, destroying the lives of humans and other-than-humans.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is tightly linked to global supply chains of soy and beef, and to the intensifying use of hazardous agrochemicals whose impacts now reach deep into Indigenous ...

The resource rush in the Arctic is not just one more case where extraction volumes and projects have increased, but has unique, yet globally important qualities. There are myriad opportunities to draw broader theoretical and empirical understandings on the phenomena included and related to global land grabbing due to the unique dynamics in the Arctic; including the Arctic’s natural conditions, the changes in Northern polities, the particularity of international relations, and the rapidly changing interrelations between climate, ecological crises, and ecological collapses. Permafrost melting is making extraction of minerals and fossil fuels much more difficult, risky, and even impossible, as extractive infrastructures that have been built with great sunk costs are deteriorating and spreading pollution into the Arctic areas. The rapidly advancing climate catastrophe can now be already observed, firsthand, in the Arctic. This can give insights into what kinds of dynamics can be expected globally. Rapid collapses of extractive infrastructures caused by climate catastrophes are ever more likely to dampen the forecasts for expanding resource frontiers. This chapter explores these transformations in and through the Arctic in the interface of climate crises, ecological collapses, resource extraction and global land grabbing.

Pesticides are becoming a key topic in critical academic research; they entail substantial negative global impacts on human health and other-than-humans’ existences. Even though decades of agroecological research and practice have demonstrated that no pesticides are needed to produce enough food, pesticides are still most typically taken for granted as an indispensable part of food production. In this article, we analyse events and policies through which Brazilian agriculture has become a global hotspot for pesticide consumption in the global agrarian capitalism. We provide an overview of the pesticide legalisation in Brazilian agriculture and discuss the ramifications of recent changes for pesticide-free agriculture. The post-2016 legalisation of pesticides has taken place concomitantly with a quick dismantling of the structures supporting agroecology and protecting the environment. The toxic turn of the Brazilian agriculture is seen in part as a reactionary response to the momentum of agroecology, which removes pesticides from agriculture, that had gained strength under the first Workers’ Party regime between 2003 and 2016. A pivotal policy goal for the new Lula government should be an agroecological transformation, which can be justified by politicising pesticide use as a major, multidimensional problem of the ‘agribusiness economy’.

To better understand current conflicts related to human–wolf interactions in Finland, this article undertakes a longue‐durée examination of societal structural transformations and how they have influenced ways of relating to nature in the country. Through a world‐ecological perspective, we weave together a historical review and results of ethnographic fieldwork to explain how and why human–wolf relations in Finland transformed from indifferent coexistence to purposeful eradication in the late 19th century and ultimately to contemporary contested protection. We argue that the nature‐making capacities of capitalist development are an integral part of the historical circumstances that led to the eradication of wolves, which was not only the result of animosity towards wolves but also fuelled by the interests of elite hunters. The resulting negative perceptions, coupled with changes in practices and landscapes during the wolf‐less era, are central in current contestations, illustrating the deep ideological, emotional, and practical nature relations that capitalism creates.

The Arctic is often cast as a site where natural resources can be extracted with processes eased by retreating sea ice. This article argues that Arctic resource euphoria is misplaced – at least partly – due to the worsening climatic, ecological, and social crises that increase the costs and risks of extraction. Permafrost melt is making mineral and fossil fuel extraction riskier and more difficult, as extractive infrastructures – built with great sunk costs – are deteriorating. The climate catastrophe can already be observed, first-hand, in the Arctic. This can give insights into what kinds of dynamics can be expected globally. The deterioration of extractive infrastructures caused by the climate crisis is likely to dampen the forecasts for expanding extractivism. This article identifies interdisciplinary research gaps and needs, while offering new prognoses for the future in and through the Arctic at the interface of climate crises, global climate tipping points, and resource extraction.