Public land privatisation and commodification as a field of changing social relations: The making of the Albanian Riviera

The paper critically explores public land privatisation and commodification as a particularly significant field of changing social relations. It focuses on Albania’s southern coast as it changed from an area of rural communities with light vacation and recreation activities and re-oriented itself towards international migration networks, intensifying coastal tourism, and the gradual making of the Albanian Riviera. By providing empirical evidence from fieldwork in the area of Himara, along with a review of the legal framework, and through the theoretical lenses of neo-liberalism and post-socialism, the paper investigates two episodes of public land privatisation and commodification: first, the de-collectivisation of cooperative agricultural land in the 1990s, and second, the long-term leasing of public land for large-scale tourism development since the mid-2000s. Analysing these two episodes sheds light on how the state provided the respective legal frameworks so as to open up differentiated land markets, and on the close relationship between the making of the Albanian Riviera, the “restitution” of private ownership, and the unmaking of common and collective social relations and significations. In turn, the paper argues that public land privatisation and commodification have destabilised and qualitatively changed social relations centred on the land which had survived from the pre-socialist and the socialist eras, by turning them into primarily commodity relations. This has also heightened multiple social tensions and conflicts, leading to a multiply-contested rural space and the rise of new social stratifications, polarisations, and inequalities in the post-socialist era.