'The guardian of every other rights': Challenging the liberal discourse of property in human rights law

This chapter critically examines the centrality of property in liberal discourse, stemming from the conflation of property and freedom. It argues that drawing the definition of the human right to property from domestic practice is erroneous, since it fails to account for lived experiences of property and holds the risk of transferring the exclusionary attributes of liberal property rights. Liberal property emphasizes marketability, transferability and clear legal titles, features which do not necessarily align with alternative relationships to land. This chapter also addresses the question of the social function of property which, while often discussed in liberal theory, does not reflect the ways in which property can provide social participation in itself. In its place, this chapter proposes to talk of the ‘social potential’ of property, underlying both property’s internalized ability to provide emancipation and the fact that it is not exclusively responsible for providing permanence, material security, privacy, and social existence, virtues mythically associated with property.