Albanian communities resist Kushner-funded luxury resort on ecologically critical island, exposing global land speculation and neoliberal conservation failures
Original framing: “Albanians protest against Kushner-backed project threatening the environment” — Middle East Eye
Albania's post-1991 land privatization created a legal vacuum where communal lands could be reclassified as 'unused' and sold to foreign investors, a pattern repeated across the Balkans under EU pressure to 'modernize' agriculture. The Kushner project mirrors 19th-century colonial land grabs in the Mediterranean, where European elites acquired coastal territories under the guise of 'progress,' displacing local populations. The island's designation as 'uninhabited' echoes the colonial doctrine of *terra nullius*, erasing centuries of seasonal habitation by pastoralists and fishermen.
The Albanian resistance to the Kushner-backed resort is a microcosm of a global pattern where financialized land speculation, enabled by weak governance and complicit elites, masquerades as 'sustainable development.
' The project's framing as a threat to 'biodiversity' obscures its role in a centuries-long cycle of Mediterranean land dispossession, from Ottoman-era enclosures to post-communist privatization, where communal lands are recast as vacant assets for extraction. Indigenous and local knowledge systems—whether Albanian fishermen's seasonal calendars or Māori concepts of land as kin—are systematically erased by Western conservation models that prioritize charismatic species over ecosystem integrity. Yet the resistance also reveals a pathway forward: community land trusts with legal rights for ecosystems, sovereign wealth funds for ecological restoration, and EU policy reforms that treat land as a public good, not a financial instrument. The trickster in this story is not the protesters but the system itself, which uses the language of 'green' and 'progress' to cloak its predatory logic—a logic that can only be undone by reweaving land, life, and law into a fabric of intergenerational justice.