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Classifying Like a State: Land Dispossession on Eastern Crete’s Contested Mountains
Author(s) -
Korfiati Ioanna P.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12640
Subject(s) - appropriation , state (computer science) , politics , land tenure , capital (architecture) , dialectic , bureaucracy , political economy , land reform , political science , property (philosophy) , economic system , geography , sociology , economics , law , archaeology , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology , algorithm , computer science , agriculture
Despite the widespread attention to capital investments in land and property around the globe, the active re‐regulating role of the neoliberal state in processes of “accumulation by dispossession” remains underexplored. Through an in‐depth look at the dispossession of highly fragmented and loosely regulated private land for windfarm investments on Crete’s eastern corner, Sitia, this paper re‐affirms the political nature of the forcible appropriation of land for large‐scale investments; dissects the specific mechanisms in which the state dispossesses land on behalf of investors and promotes the forcible appropriation of land from below ; and problematises the dialectic relationship of both rupture and continuity between crisis and inherited, path‐dependent relations embedded in land. The transformation of Sitia’s loosely regulated, informal relations on land is made possible through the mobilisation of the state’s bureaucratic and normalising powers, which redefine the concept of forest and dispossess through classifying land as such.