Sacrifice Zone
Mattia Colli Vignarelli
The term sacrifice zone refers to a geographically defined area in which the environmental, health, and social costs of industrial production, resource extraction, or national development are disproportionately concentrated, typically affecting low-income populations, racially minoritised communities, and Indigenous peoples, while the economic benefits of those activities largely accrue elsewhere. As a concept that captures geo-localised socio-ecological inequality, it provides an effective critical vocabulary for naming the spatial dimension of the capitalist relation.
The term’s earliest traceable use dates to North American livestock management in the mid-twentieth century, where it denoted a fenced paddock deliberately degraded by heavy grazing, animal waste, or trampling to protect surrounding pastureland (Juskus, 2023). The underlying logic presented itself as conservationist: concentrate ecological damage in a small area so that the remainder of the pasture retains productive capacity. Even in this original deployment, however, the concept already encoded the structure that would later prove decisive in its critical reappropriation. Indeed, animal waste becomes a problem to be contained only when agricultural activity is subordinated to the logic of capitalist accumulation (Pellizzoni, 2025).
The term later migrated into the energy sector during the renewed wave of US extractivism triggered by the international supply crises of the 1970s. From the 1980s onward, struggles against environmental racism expanded the concept to describe the disproportionate exposure of racialised communities – especially Native Americans (Churchill, 2002) – to military and industrial hazards, before it came to more broadly designate places and communities marked by enduring severe socio-economic and ecological harm (Larner, 2010).
The expression has recently entered the international human rights domain. The former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, David R. Boyd, in collaboration with the Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights, Marcos Orellana, addressed sacrifice zones in report A/HRC/49/53 (2022). The Special Rapporteur defined sacrifice zones as “places where residents suffer devastating physical and mental health consequences and human rights violations as a result of living in pollution hotspots and heavily contaminated areas” (para. 27). Notably, the document identifies the major examples of sacrifice zones in the world, spanning across all continents and economies. The report was prepared on the basis of submissions from more than twenty countries and from youth, Indigenous peoples, students, academics, civil society and human rights institutions (para. 4). This reflects the global diffusion of the term as a powerful vocabulary of socio-ecological justice.
In some cases, therefore, the language of human rights has proven instrumental in exposing sacrifice zones and the governments complicit in their creation. This has happened, for instance, in the case of the area surrounding the Ilva steel plant in Taranto (Italy), whose decades-long emissions have contaminated the air, soil, and marine sediments of the surrounding region, causing elevated rates of respiratory disease and cancer among the local population, and which led to the Cordella et al. v Italy case before the European Court of Human Rights. Another landmark case is La Oroya v Peru case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, where the century-long operations of a metallurgical complex have been found responsible for the severe contamination of air, water, and soil across the site, with blood lead levels among children far exceeding safe thresholds. In the latter case, the Court explicitly used the term “sacrifice zone” to denounce the conditions of the area (para. 180).
Marcelo Lopes de Souza situates the sacrifice zone within a biopolitical framework, describing it as a “territory-space-environment” in which the lives of the “urban hyperprecariat” become disposable (Lopes de Souza, 2021). Inflecting this with Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” (Mbembe & Meintjes, 2003) – that he readapts to identify sovereignty as the power to determine who must live and who may die – sacrifice zones emerge as territories in which biopolitical power is exercised with particular subtlety and accompanied by a specific apologetical rhetoric. The narrative of sacrifice is a constant in modern political discourse: the socio-ecological impacts of industrial or extractive sites are routinely justified by reference to employment, economic development, or, today, the imperatives of green transition.
A decisive contribution to the analysis of the sacrifice zone lies in foregrounding the role of law as a constitutive rather than merely external to its creation. Sacrifice zones are produced and legitimised by legal instruments, and do not simply arise from failure of legal protection: zoning plans, extractive concessions and licences, foreign investment legislation, and, at the international level, international investment agreements. This is particularly visible, for instance, in the case of “green” sacrifice zones, the so-called “lithium triangle” on the border between Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, where these layers of legal protection interact to facilitate an extractivist model of development. If it is true that in sacrifice zones “whole subsets of humanity [are] categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable” (Klein, 2014, p. 310), that somehow is nothing but the operation of the law.
This resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s figure of the Homo Sacer (Agamben, 1998). In Roman law, the sacratio was a sanction for some of the most serious crimes, which led to the exclusion from the community and consecration to the gods, who could not be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony but could be killed by anyone without legal consequence. For Agamben, the law constitutes the political body precisely through the exclusion of what shall remain outside it – sovereign is he who decides on the exception. Similarly, the sacrifice zone is constituted by law as a space of exclusionary inclusion: its residents remain juridically present within the state but are effectively stripped of the rights – to health, to life, to a healthy environment – that political membership is supposed to guarantee. Along with Lopes De Souza (2021), we may argue that their political lives as individuals are expendable, but the bare life of this humanity is necessary to reproduce the capitalist relation.
The intellectual operation that underlies and justifies the effective suspension of essential human rights – the right to health, the right to life, the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, the right to private and family life – for entire communities is epitomised in the concept of development. At least since the aftermath of the Second World War, development has functioned as a meta-principle that structures the institutional and substantive dimensions of law, particularly international law, informing how the latter shapes the global political economy (Pahuja, 2011). In this context, the concept of the sacrifice zone performs an important denaturalising function. A sacrifice zone is a place in which life is valued differently because a decision has been taken, legally enabled and sustained that it should do so, in the name of developmental imperatives.
Undeniably, toxins migrate across jurisdictional lines; food chains and water tables connect fenceline communities to wider populations; the systemic logic of profit maximisation at the expense of workers and ecosystems extends from the local to the national and global scale. The sacrifice zone is, in this sense, only the most visible expression of an economic system that reclaims the entire planet as its sacrificial space (Klein, 2014), in what has been named the Anthropocene or, perhaps more precisely, the Capitalocene (Moore, 2017). The porosity of sacrifice zone borders illustrates the ultimate impossibility of maintaining the separation between production and reproduction.
Yet the flexibility of the concept, which accounts for much of its critical and mobilising power, also warrants methodological caution (Auerochs, 2025). Generalisations risk diluting the term’s analytical and political force. The critical efficacy of the term depends on remaining close to the perspectives of those actually living within the zones it names – what anthropologists distinguish as an emic rather than an etic vantage point (Ibid., 4). Used at a planetary scale without reference to specific communities and specific harms, the sacrifice zone risks becoming a mere rhetorical figure. This is a reminder that the generative power of the term lies in the intersection between the global and the local: the particular body, the particular community, the particular contaminated watershed, held in view against the global architecture of capitalist accumulation that produced them.
Finally, the polysemy of sacrifice opens a horizon beyond critique. What has been made into a sacrifice zone – designated as expendable, consecrated to destruction – can be reclaimed as a sacred zone: a place where the interdependence of human and non-human life becomes newly visible and valued. In fact, this describes a political and existential practice that many affected communities have enacted.
Donna Haraway’s (2016) injunction to «stay with the trouble» offers a conceptual resource for thinking about resistance from within sacrifice zones, rather than despite them. For Haraway, staying with the trouble is active response-ability: a commitment to making unexpected alliances across species, generations, and geographies, including precisely those places that modernity has designated as disposable. Sacrifice zones are “open wounds” where the unnaturalness of human bordering practices (Anzaldúa, 2012) becomes utterly apparent. The entanglement between human and more-than-human life in sacrifice zones is distorted yet intensified and made urgently visible, as demonstrated, for instance, in the resistance of local communities in Quintero-Puchuncaví Bay, Coronel Bay, and Hualpén-Talcahuano Bay, three highly polluted and industrialised areas in Chile (Valenzuela-Fuentes et al, 2021). The obligation to respond to it is correspondingly more pressing.
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