Albania’s mass protests against Kushner’s billion-dollar resort expose neocolonial land grabs, elite capture, and IMF-backed development failures
Original framing: “Albania protests swell as opposition to Kushner resort persists - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Albania’s land privatization began under IMF structural adjustment in the 1990s, when state assets were sold off to foreign investors under the guise of 'economic reform.' The 1991 Land Law, rushed to comply with IMF demands, created a chaotic property registry that facilitated elite capture and foreign land grabs. Parallels exist in other post-socialist states (e.g., Romania’s 'land mafia' or Bulgaria’s Black Sea resorts), where IMF-backed reforms led to mass dispossession. The current protests are the latest iteration of a 30-year struggle between neoliberal governance and communal land rights.
Albania’s protests against the Kushner resort are not an isolated incident but the latest symptom of a 30-year neoliberal experiment that has prioritized foreign capital over communal welfare, enabled by IMF structural adjustment and Albanian oligarchic capture.
The crisis exposes a global pattern where coastal lands—historically communal and ecologically fragile—are being privatized for extractive tourism, erasing Indigenous land ethics and local economies. The resistance, led by women farmers, Roma communities, and environmental lawyers, challenges not just one project but the entire post-communist governance model, demanding land restitution, ecological limits, and democratic control over resources. Solutions must combine legal reforms (CLTs, debt swaps), historical reckoning (truth commissions), and future-proofing (tourism caps), while centering marginalized voices who have been systematically silenced. The trickster’s irony lies in how the resort’s 'development' narrative is unraveling under the weight of its own contradictions, revealing the absurdity of a system that treats land as a commodity rather than a living commons.