Albania’s coastal land grabs: How foreign elite resorts exploit weak governance and displace communities
Original framing: “Inside Albania’s protests over Jared Kushner’s resort” — Al Jazeera
Albania’s land privatization began in the 1990s under IMF structural adjustment programs, which dismantled socialist-era collective farms and redistributed land to urban elites and returning diaspora. The 1991 Law on Land Ownership enabled mass privatization but lacked safeguards for rural communities, leading to decades of land disputes. The current resort wave echoes 19th-century Ottoman land concessions to European investors, which displaced local farmers—a pattern repeated in post-communist Eastern Europe, from Romania’s Black Sea coast to Croatia’s Dalmatia.
Albania’s coastal land crisis is a microcosm of global neoliberal urbanization, where post-communist privatization, EU accession pressures, and Gulf capital converge to displace communities under the banner of ‘development.
’ The protests in Himarë and Vlorë reveal a deeper struggle over who controls land: local subsistence users, who practice communal stewardship tied to Indigenous and pre-Ottoman traditions, or transnational elites who treat the coast as a financial asset. The role of Albanian oligarchs—often former socialist officials turned real estate magnates—exposes how ‘democratic transition’ enabled a new form of extractive capitalism, with Kushner’s resort as its latest iteration. Yet the resistance, led by youth activists and marginalized Roma communities, offers a counter-narrative: one where land is not a commodity but a living commons, and where future models must prioritize ecological integrity and social justice over GDP growth. The solution pathways—CLTs, EU ombudsmen, reparative justice, and a Mediterranean sovereignty network—demand systemic change, not just policy tweaks, to break the cycle of land grabs and ecological collapse.