russia’s* Property Regimes as a Spatial Technology of Occupation

• In Event: Infrastructures of Occupation I: Apparatuses of *russian (Re)coloniality

Abstract

Responding to calls to better understand the workings of private property in authoritarian regimes, this talk will analyze the particularities of russia’s legal infrastructures of occupation through land enclosure. It will examine how changes in the russian legal system – in the form of land codes, decrees, and amendments – inform and are informed by extra-legal land grabbing practices in the occupied territories of Ukraine in the face of a full-scale invasion. Tracing the official discourse on land, the talk will reflect on the historical experiences of land enclosure of the russian land commune – an alternative form of popular sovereignty that was subsequently appropriated for re-colonial purposes. This will allow to scrutinize the interplay of spatial technologies of de- and re-colonization in russian property regimes and their long institutional memory.

Author

• Vera Smirnova, Kansas State U