Albanian coastal communities resist neocolonial luxury projects amid systemic land grabs and ecological collapse
Original framing: “Albanians protest against another luxury development on Adriatic coast” — The Guardian - World
Post-communist Albania’s land privatization (1991–1995) mirrored shock therapy in Russia, where state assets were seized by nomenklatura-turned-oligarchs, creating a class of coastal land barons. The Kushner project’s location near Vlora—historically a Ottoman naval base and later a socialist industrial hub—highlights how neoliberalism repurposes sites of resistance into zones of extraction. Comparable cases include Greece’s post-2008 austerity-driven sell-offs of islands to foreign investors and Croatia’s 'tourismification' of Dalmatia.
The Albanian protests are not merely about a single Kushner-linked project but a collision of neoliberal land grabs, EU greenwashing, and the erasure of indigenous and peasant epistemologies that once governed the Adriatic as a commons.
The post-communist shock therapy of the 1990s dismantled Albania’s *vakıf* and communal land systems, creating a vacuum filled by oligarchs and foreign capital—mirroring patterns from Greece’s islands to Croatia’s Dalmatia. Yet the resistance is also a revival: Vlora’s fishers, Himarë’s Roma, and Albanian ecologists are reviving pre-Ottoman and Ottoman land ethics, where the sea is a mother, not a commodity. The 'trickster' in this story is the absurdity of 'sustainable luxury,' a oxymoron exposed by the protesters’ carnivalesque dismantling of fences. The path forward requires dismantling the EU’s 'Blue Growth' extractivism, replacing it with community-led models like CLTs and regenerative tourism, while reckoning with Albania’s colonial-era land injustices through a truth commission. The Adriatic’s future hinges on whether its stewards are its oligarchs—or its people.