The scaling-back, scaling-up, and scaling-down of liberal nation states since the 1970s have fundamentally changed the contexts in which state responses to squatting must be understood. The impacts of neoliberalism, globalization, and localism – scaling-back, scaling-up, and scaling-down the nation-state – have provoked new questions for liberal property theories. While the foundations of the classical nineteenth century liberal state and twentieth century liberal ownership societies – which underpin liberal theories of private property – have shifted, the “invisibility” of the state in liberal property theories has meant that this fundamental change has attracted relatively little attention. Against the backdrop of the global financial crisis and Great Recession, the politics of “austerity” and affordable housing crises, the re-emergence of squatting as an issue of political concern and the use of state power to respond to unlawful occupation have re-positioned debates about “private property” in the public realm. For property scholarship to succeed in understanding and advancing solutions to contemporary property problems, it is important that our theoretical and methodological frameworks are attuned to the real contexts of state action.

In this chapter, we explore the phenomenon of homeless squatting on empty land through the prism of ownership and owners, and reflect on how the changing nature and conceptions of ownership have re-shaped the norms and narratives of absent ownership. We begin by examining “ownership” as a scaled concept: building on our approach in Chapter 6, we explore how the registers of scale – and, particularly, the dynamics of “upscaling” and “downscaling” – reveal the multiple layers of meaning, values and interactions within the frame of ownership: between individual (absent owners) and institutional (the law of ownership; the institution of private property) stakeholders, and between these interests, squatters, and the state. We reflect on how the character of ownership, and of owners, have changed since the 1970s, resulting in the emergence of the “investor model” of owner-occupation, and the normalization of small-scale landlordism and property development. We consider the resilience needs of absent owners, and examples of state action in relation to unlawful occupation that allocates resilience to absentee owners. Finally, we begin to reflect on the impact of absenteeism on neighborhoods, and the relationships between absentee owners and owner-neighbors.

States respond to homeless squatting in empty land by selectively conferring resilience on individuals, groups and/or institutions. In this chapter, we reflect on the role of aggregated or collective claims to state-backed resilience linked to homeless squatting on empty property. Specifically, we consider how interests become aggregated; how aggregation promotes collective consciousness and reaffirms individual claims; and how groups garner state support through the exercise of collective influence or voice. We recognize that the co-option of state actors and agencies to shore up the resilience of the group is not unidirectional but bidirectional. While collective or group interests may seek out state-backed resilience in the form of “other-regarding” state action, states also invoke collective interests to justify or explain their actions, particularly when the state’s own self-interest aligns with the interests or claims of the group. In this chapter we broaden the scope of our “problem topography” by alternately centering a range of networked or aggregated stakeholders: neighbors, market actors, social activists. We explore how collective interests cluster around specific claims; how they exercise influence to secure state action, and also how state actors and institutions justify or explain their responses with reference to the protection of specific group interests. These collective claims are not distinct from, but overlap with the individual claims of owners and squatters, who are themselves simultaneously self-interested individuals and members of networks that share common interests and goals.

This chapter focuses on the city of Harish, a project that various governments have tried to develop over the last forty years. The first attempts included a kibbutz, a Community Settlement and, later, a Suburban Settlement. All were unsuccessful, mainly due to the site’s peripheral location and proximity to the West Bank and other Arab towns. By 2010, the huge demand for new dwelling units, the construction of the Trans-Israel Highway and the recently erected West Bank Separation Barrier all contributed to turning Harish into an attractive piece of real estate. This enabled the Israeli government to designate it as a city with a target population of 60,000. Focusing on the case of Harish, this chapter illustrates the financialization of the national settlement project, explaining how the state apparatus was used to create a real-estate market in a given area to supply the dwelling units that were needed while expanding the national territorial project. Analyzing the urban layout and the housing units in Harish, as well as the everyday life of the families in it, this chapter explains how this future city embodies the privatization of the national settlement project.

Both worker bargaining power and political democracy have been gripped by a mutually reinforcing crisis that has worsened for decades, harming working people (especially communities of color) and undermining our social fabric. This chapter argues that this crisis had become existential by 2020 as the pandemic, policing, privatization, financialization, growing monopoly, and rising unemployment exacerbated inequality, sparked social unrest, and threatened democracy.  It contends that our response must link the defense of political democracy to the fight for bargaining power for workers in the twenty-first century economy through innovative movement campaigns and new alliances that tie together the degradation of the environment, the upending of democratic oversight, and the more general degradation of the political economy to the exploitation of the workforce by rent-seeking corporate power.

This introductory chapter identifies key puzzles and questions, lays out the book’s main argument, and highlights the book’s contributions and implications. The book develops a new comparative framework that integrates credit regimes and social policies in the study of comparative political economy. It contributes to a range of literatures in political science and sociology, including the literatures on states and markets by moving beyond the focus on a purely substitutive link between welfare states and financial markets; it expands work in international political economy on capital flows and policy scope by introducing the notion of credit regimes; and it sheds new light on research on income and wealth inequality by documenting credit markets’ regressive allocation and distribution of resources and responsibilities and new forms of inequality and discrimination. The chapter then lays out the book’s main empirical strategies and data sources. The book’s key approach is to studying individuals within particular institutional constraints in different countries cope with social risks and seize social opportunities. It does so by drawing on a new measure of credit regime permissiveness, longitudinal micro-level panel data from Denmark, the United States, and Germany, and an original cross-national survey.

Wealth creation and human rights gain particular significance in the context of globalization, sustainability and financialization. Globalization is understood as “a kind of international system in the making” (T.L. Friedman), characterized by an increasing interconnectedness of the world, due to the revolution of information technology and an immense reduction in the costs of transportation and communication. A new framework of international relations distinguishes four types: the foreign-country type, the empire type, the interconnection type and the globalization type. They are part of the extended conception of business and economic ethics at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels. Sustainability, defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), is incorporated and concretized in the Sustainable Development Goals (2015). And financialization as “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies” (G.A. Epstein) stands in striking contrast with the comprehensive conception of wealth creation.

This chapter examines four novels published since the Irish economic crash and set in Dublin during the late boom and early bust years. Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011), Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012), and Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015). Each of these novels details the effects of economic developments on the live, finances, and psyches of Irish citizens, while also exploring how a culture of accumulating indebtedness has altered the nature of contemporary Irish reality and the real ties that band society together. Reading these novels in the context of a recent turn in Irish Studies away from cultural concerns and toward a focus on Ireland’s “real economy,” I show how these novelists pay attention to the economy while not being afraid to explore world views, ideologies, desires, and feelings that serve to make it real.

This chapter inquires into the role of money, debt, and finance in colonial expansion, as well as practical attempts to decolonize financial and monetary regimes.