Right to Possess

The “right to possess” follows in the same theorization as the Marxist concept of the “Right of Occupation” (Marx 1842) and continues the reflection on what Marx called the “Social War of Properties.” The “right to possess” refers to the inherent conflict of marginalized communities defending the legitimacy of their “hybrid properties” (ibid.), meaning a form of property which meets their primary needs (housing, agriculture, access to resources), against the strictly positivist conception of the holders of real property, such as large investors and states (Cavanagh 2013). This concept aims to enhance the ongoing discussion about “possession” by suggesting that private property represents a form of privatization of possession (Bensaid 2007). It notably enriches the theoretical discourse surrounding how feminist Indigenous communities around the world do not perceive land as a commodity to own (Guzman Arroyo 2019; Paredes 2017). Instead, they regard land as a nurturing entity, often referred to as Pachamama, which protects them and requires their protection in return. The Indigenous feminist movement has effectively articulated the idea that land is not merely a resource to be owned or exploited; it possesses sacred significance and spiritual value (Gomez 2024). Land symbolizes their cultural heritage and serves as a critical source of life that sustains their communities. Hence, the “right to possess” becomes an analytical tool for examining feminist struggles for land and housing rights, which transcend the liberal discourse that promotes empowerment through access to private property (Pruitt 2007). While the liberal discourse emphasizes access to private property as a means of empowerment, it fails to recognize common or collective forms of property and possession as valid means of resisting dispossession (Verma 2014). Additionally, this discourse tends to prioritize individualistic solutions, overlooking the collective nature of feminist struggles for land and housing rights (Berriane 2016).

My different fieldwork observations showed that within their struggle against dispossession, communities utilize the tactics of occupation. Yet, occupation cannot be reduced to a mere tactic: its use reflects nuanced meanings and relations to possession. It is through occupation that the communities facing dispossession enforce their right to possess and formalize the conflict by strengthening their position as they negotiate with the state (Holston 2009). This concept expands on these findings to examine how property works in practice by exploring de facto possession as a form of resistance (forms of occupation and how they are used). The slogan “lan narhal” (we will not leave/we will remain) is emblematic of the resistance to the evictions of the inhabitants of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Palestine (Garbett 2021). It echoes an observation I made in my various fields of investigation in Morocco and Tunisia: possession is a tool for the legitimisation of the existence of dispossessed communities. Indeed, the state’s refusal to recognize a community’s possession of a house and/or land as a legitimate property right not only legitimizes eviction procedures, but also denies a community’s right to exist. In this sense it is interesting to note that the use of the term “wujood” (translated as existence) is often used by Palestinians to make explicit the link between their presence in the territory and their resistance to the process of erasure to which they are subjected (Grassroots Al-Quds 2016). In this sense, the “right to possess” allows us to analytically go beyond the purely material aspect of dispossession to integrate an existential dimension. Following the reflections of authors such as Paul Sereni (2007), the “right to possess” thus challenges the classical concept of “possessive individualism” to assert that dispossession works as an apparatus that controls and appropriates the spatiality, mobility, affectivity, potentiality, and relationality of (neo)colonized people (Dickenson 2017). Through the debate on the effect of {post}colonial dispossession on the erasure of culture and/or indigenous identity, the “right to possess” in the case of Palestine allows us to better understand the existential dimension of other struggles for land and housing happening in postcolonial contexts, such as the Amazigh (i.e. berber) movement in North Africa (El Kahlaoui 2024). Thus, a more global discussion on property theories would engage with the considerable literature linking property rights and citizenship (Roy and AlSayyad 2004; Lund 2011).

The right to possess shows that property conflicts are normative when it comes to the notion of ownership of property (land or housing in this study). Therefore, our theoretical objective is to develop epistemological sub-categories for the analysis of property conflicts, under which contextualized property (Fox 2007) is defined from an anthropology of law approach that emphasizes the way property is enacted in situ. The actual lived experience of property shows that it is different from formalized relations by the state or privatized real estate (Rose 1990). Far from being merely descriptive, the right to possess looks at practicalities of dispossession to assess and contribute to existing theories of private property rooted in ethnographic specificity, while engaging with current feminist work on indigenous political ecology (Dhillon 2020) and live forms of property (Bhandar 2018). To do so, it seems essential to reintroduce the colonial dimension into the analysis of property conflicts (ibid.): the historical processes at the origin of land appropriation and privatization in the Global South were primarily colonial and interlocked with capitalism (Mamdani 2020). Hence, property conflicts can be analysed through several levels of theoretical frameworks. While Marxist theory had mobilized the concept of exploitation as the main conceptual framing for analyzing the privatization process, “the right to possess” mobilizes colonial and postcolonial relations as the main framing for questioning the “double history of capitalism” (Chatterjee 2013; Guha 1997; Lefebvre 1997), thus informing theories of property from a Global South perspective. The case of Palestine is a point of intersection to understand the decolonial perspective on colonial settlement and its impact on property regimes (Kedar et al. 2018; Mikdashi 2013).