{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.027000099631363954, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0130517086778918, 'mean_word_length': 5.184842883548983, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 1, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Like Oil Floating on Water: Italy’s Olive Crisis and the Politics of Backlash against Transnational Legal Orders

This article analyzes how failures to reconcile international law with local knowledge during moments of political crisis can frustrate compliance, foment conspiracy, and foster backlash against transnational legal orders. It does so through a case study of the law and politics surrounding the destructive outbreak of xylella fastidiosa amidst the olive groves of Italy in 2013. The epidemic prompted interventions by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice to limit the pathogen’s diffusion by applying EU environmental regulations and mandating the eradication of thousands of trees. Yet given limited consultations of local stakeholders and lackluster local knowledge, the EU’s containment efforts backfired, sparking a farmers’ revolt and prompting Italian judges to traffic in conspiracy to obstruct compliance. By drawing on theories of legal mobilization and political sociologies of contentious events, this article shows how Italy’s olive crisis is part of a broader trend: The rise of a contentious politics of resentment that can desiccate the on-the-ground authority of even the most well-entrenched transnational legal orders.

transnational law had long been taken for granted. 3 This article uses the Italian case to understand what is fueling the increasingly contentious politics afflicting transnational legal orders. For one crisis shaping Italy's place in the EU captures these shifts in a nutshell.
In Italy, there is hardly a more poignant symbol of resilience in the face of crisis than the olive tree. When the country's party system collapsed in the early 1990s, Romano Prodi invoked the olive tree to resurrect the center-left, noting that it "is the outcome of hundreds of years of human labor, [and] is contorted because it has the strength to resist even the most severe weather." 4 Such sentiments are especially deeply rooted in the southern region of Puglia, where 60 million olive trees outnumber people by 15 to 1. 5 Not only do these trees generate 40% of Italy's olive oil, 6 but they are an integral part of local identity and family life. "These olive trees have sustained and enriched us for centuries," explains Corrado, a farmer in the town of Ostuni in a 2017 interview; "They're the ones that constituted me, my parents, my grandparents. All of us have lived thanks to these trees." 7 In years past, Corrado's words would have conveyed the promise of rebirth. Yet in 2017, they betrayed a sense of desperation: For his interlocutors were not olive oil aficionados, but journalists covering an emergent crisis. Just a few years earlier in 2013, some nearby farmers began noticing tiny globs of spit nestled in the grasses lining their olive groves. Within the globs lie nascent spittlebugs, the vectors of a deadly pathogen that had never been detected in Europe: Xylella fastidiosa. The bacterium restricts water flow in the plant it infects, turning its leaves brown as it slowly dries to death.
By 2017, groves like Corrado's lay at the epicenter of an epidemic that would kill over 10 million olive trees, cost 100,000 jobs, produce 1.2 billion euros in damages, and cause a surge in world olive oil  prices of 20%. 8 As vast expanses of formerly lush groves harboring specimens up to 1,500 years old 9 desiccated into sickly cemeteries, comparisons to "apocalyptic" plagues proliferated. 10 Yet analogies to biblical catastrophes were not the only interpretive frames that diffused to make sense of crisis: Many others targeted the European Union (EU) and its laws. But why? The answer helps us retrace how transnational law becomes intertwined with contentious politics and scorned as "descend[ing] on the everyday as an all-powerful outsider." 11 By leveraging newspaper records and semi-structured interviews conducted during Italy's olive crisis, this article "process traces" 12 how failures to reconcile international law with local knowledge can frustrate compliance, foment conspiracy, and foster backlash against transnational legal orders like the EU.
I argue that backlash against the EU legal order during Italy's olive crisis is best understood through an interdisciplinary lens that draws on political sociologies of contentious events and sociolegal theories of legal mobilization. 13 This approach treats political crises as rapidly unfolding events capable of calling existing practices into question and reconstituting people's identities and orientations to the law. When said crises are sparked or exacerbated by a widening gap between legal obligations and lived experience, they can give rise to a social identity forged upon defiance-rather than obeisance-of legal rules.

II. Storm Clouds Gather
While the scientific origins of Italy's olive crisis can be retraced to the import of infected plants from Costa Rica, 16 its political origins lie elsewhere: Namely, within an emergent dissonance between the crisis' speedy yet technocratic management within EU circles and the political gridlock and communal trauma that simultaneously ensued within Puglia.
Scientists at the University of Bari

III. Mobilizing Backlash
As recent political science research has shown, a perception of distributive injustice and lackluster appreciation for lived experience in rural and farming communities can often be mobilized to wage a "politics of resentment." 37 In Europe and elsewhere, such politics can fuel populist parties and social movements organizing backlash against the authority claims of transnational legal orders. 38 It is precisely this political process that was triggered by efforts to apply and enforce EU law during Italy's olive crisis.
More precisely, there were at least two proximate triggers of a farmers' revolt against the EU.
First, a local environmental NGO released a highly publicized report to the EU health commissioner containing undated online videos refuting EFSA's findings and accusing the Commission of "condemning to death the whole Apulia eco-system." 39 While the report was summarily dismissed in , https://corrieredelmezzogiorno.corriere.it/bari/cronaca/15_ottobre_13/xylella-tar-lazio-accoglie-ricorsostop-tagli-ulivi-torchiarolo-616e91be-7187-11e5-8a35-85b57ae5d6f8.shtml. activists set up tents, forged human shields, and climbed atop trees marked for eradication, shouting: "Assassins, those olive trees have more history than us all!" 48 The owner of the trees in question wrote a letter published by Puglia's leading newspaper, La Gazzetta Del Mezzogiorno, which dramatized it as a "call for help" against "savage" EU measures. 49 A few months later, farmers organized a protest before Bari's city hall: "This is a declaration of war!" they chanted in reference to the Commission decision,   These suits were thus framed to channel the burgeoning public perception that EU policies were spiteful of local practice and the embodied history of olive trees. But for litigation to succeed, Italian judges had to be persuaded to take these claims seriously. Thus, in their memos lodged before the regional administrative court in Rome, the lawyers alleged that "nobody really knows the content" of the "supposed 'investigations'" driving the Commission decisions, whose implementation would turn "the entire communal territory into a desert." And they added that tree eradication would be The reaction of local stakeholders was one of shock and anger. The press in Lecce described the ECJ's ruling as an "axe" striking the "people of the olive trees" like a "lightning bolt from the blue sky." 67 In Bari, the largest daily paper published a political cartoon where an olive tree was made to resemble Munch's famous "Scream" painting. 68 Politicians were equally indignant. The center-right FI party shed its initial support for an EU intervention, admonishing the ECJ for attacking "those elements most emblematic of our identity" and promising to "block the demolition cranes and pit ourselves against the absurd and unthinkable decisions of EU judges." Members of the populist M5S piled on, claiming that "Europe is first and foremost responsible for the Xyella disaster." 69

IV. The Trials and Tribulations of Noncompliance
Such public anger worked to sustain and embolden the farmers' revolt. A day after the ECJ's judgment, farmers and environmental activists took to the streets in Lecce, carrying signs reading that Puglia was "once again under attack... but we won't surrender." 70 And as their repertoire of contentious politics spread with every protest, tree funeral, 71

V. Consequences, Implications, and Silver Linings
In the final analysis, the farmers' revolt in Italy's olive crisis achieved its obstructionist goals: The decisions of the EU commission and the ECJ's confirmatory judgment have scarcely been implemented to this day. As a consequence, Xylella spread into a number of European states and, the EU's on-the-ground legal authority was severely damaged. Yet the devastation brought by the crisis eventually bore some silver linings, prompting EU officials to rethink their approach and sparking a counter-movement within Italy advocating compliance with transnational law.
First, as the farmers' revolt was emboldened by criminal inquiries, injunctions, defiant litigation campaigns, and foot-dragging by elected officials, EU law was never converted into local practice. While Lecce's prosecutors begrudgingly lifted their sequestration of thousands of trees following the ECJ's decision, in January 2018, prosecutors in Bari once again sequestered an olive grove by resurrecting conspiratorial charges. 74 It took three more years for judges in Lecce to lift criminal allegations hanging over the heads of the scientists they had accused of deliberately spreading the disease and diffusing misinformation. 75 And instead of the tens of thousands of trees identified for immediate removal in late 2014 and early 2015 alone, in practice less than 2,000 were fallen through