| INTRODUCTION |
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| Year : 2004 | Volume
: 2
| Issue : 1 | Page : 1-17 |
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Post-socialist Property in Asia and Europe: Variations on 'Fuzziness'
Janet C Sturgeon1, Thomas Sikor2
1 The Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Box 1970, Providence, RI 02912, USA
2 Humboldt University Berlin, Junior Research Group on Postsocialist Land Relations, Luisenstr. 56, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Correspondence Address:
Janet C Sturgeon
The Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Box 1970, Providence, RI 02912
USA
 Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None  | Check |
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This introduction contextualises the set of articles included in this special issue and discusses their contribution to understanding the observed `fuzziness' ofproperty in post-socialist contexts. Katherine Verdery, among others, has highlighted ambiguity, or `fuzziness , as a key feature of post-socialist property relations. Property rights in practice are often quite different from the neo-liberal notion of exclusive.privatepropertypromotedinpost-socialist propertyrefoims. This introduction highlights the reasons for fuzziness identified m the individual articles and contrasts them with the overlapping and flexible property relations reported from post-colonial arenas in Africa andAsia. It concludes that post-socialist fuzzy property is similar to post-colonial ambiguous propertyrelations in many respects. The feature setting the former apartis the `lack ofroutinizedrules and crystallized practices of exclusion and inclusion' (Verdery 1999:: 55). The ruptures caused by large-scale economic, political and cultural transformations were rapid and destabilising, throwing property, identity and social relations up in the air, and opening up considerable room for manipulation. Local elite found themselves operating in somewhat of a vacuum and quickly asserted control overproductive resources or the processes allocating them. |
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