Academic interests
- Criminal Political Economies, Land Mafia, Processes of Criminalization
- Political Economy, Anthropology of Economy, Land Dispossession, Social Movements
- South Asia, India, Italy
- Political Ecology, Maritime Economies, Environmental Anthropology, Toxicity and Waste in Wetland Environments
Background
Chiara Arnavas holds a PhD at the Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oslo. Her research interests lie at the intersection between criminal political economies and political ecologies. Her work examines the emergence of South Asian criminal networks of land mafia in relation to larger processes of climate change, projects of urban sustainable development, land dispossession, and social inequalities of class, caste, gender, and religion. Her dissertation, titled The Mafiazation of Land: Crime, the State, and Real Estate Capital in West Bengal, India explores the complex relations among the people who occupy the intertwined realms of crime, the state, and business in the Indian state of West Bengal.