Squatting And The State

This book offers a fresh theoretical approach and methodology for tackling the most pressing property problems of our time.

This book offers a unique contribution, exploring how the intersections among migrants and radical squatter’s movements have evolved over past decades. The complexity and importance of squatting practices are analyzed from a bottom-up perspective, to demonstrate how the spaces of squatting can be transformed by migrants. With contributions from scholars, scholar-activists, and activists, this book provides unique insights into how squatting has offered an alternative to dominant anti-immigrant policies, and the implications of squatting on the social acceptance of migrants. It illustrates the different mechanisms of protest followed in solidarity by migrant squatters and Social Center activists, when discrimination comes from above or below, and explores how can different spatialities be conceived and realized by radical practices. Contributions adopt a variety of perspectives, from critical human geography, social movement studies, political sociology, urban anthropology, autonomous Marxism, feminism, open localism, anarchism and post-structuralism, to analyze and contextualize migrants and squatters’ exclusion and social justice issues. This book is a timely and original contribution through its exploration of migrations, squatting and radical autonomy.

This collection of critical essays considers the criminalisation of squatting from a range of different theoretical, policy and practice perspectives. While the practice of squatting has long been criminalised in some jurisdictions, the last few years have witnessed the emergence of a newly constituted political concern with unlawful occupation of land. With initiatives to address the ‘threat’ of squatting sweeping across Europe, the offence of squatting in a residential building was created in England in 2012. This development, which has attracted a large measure of media attention, has been widely regarded as a controversial policy departure, with many commentators, Parliamentarians, and professional organisations arguing that its support is premised on misunderstandings of the current law and a precarious evidence-base concerning the nature and prevalence of ‘squatting’. Moral Rhetoric and the Criminalisation of Squatting explores the significance of measures to criminalise squatting for squatters, owners and communities. The book also interrogates wider themes that draw on political philosophy, social policy, criminal justice and the nature of ownership, to consider how the assimilation of squatting to a contemporary punitive turn is shaping the political, social, legal and moral landscapes of property, housing and crime.

Housing is no longer about having a place to live – but about state pressures to conform, norms and policies regarding citizenship, and practices of surveillance and security. Breaking new ground in the field of urban politics and international relations, Securitization of Property Squatting in Europe examines and critiques legislative initiatives and examines governmental attempts to reframe urban property squatting as a crime and a threat to domestic security. Using examples from France, Netherlands, Denmark, and Great Britain, Mary Manjikian argues that developments within the European Union – including terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, the rise of right wing extremist parties, and the lifting of barriers to immigration and travel within the EU – have had effects on housing policy, which has become the subject of state security policy in Europe’s urban areas. In Denmark, squatting has often had an ideological, anti-state character. In Paris, housing policy can be viewed as a type of identity politics with squatters as transnational actors who pose a transnational security threat. In Great Britain, the role of the press has created a drive to criminalize squatting. Events in the Netherlands present two competing notions of what housing is – a human right, or an economic good produced by the free market.

This volume covers a wide spectrum of governance issues relating to small states in a global context. While different definitions of governance are given in the chapters, most authors associate governance with the setting and implementation of policies aimed at managing a country or territory, and with the related institutional structures and interventions by political actors. Generally, good governance is associated with concepts such as policy effectiveness, accountability, transparency, control of corruption, encouragement of citizens’ voice and gender equality—factors which are, in turn, linked with democracy. What emerges from the book is that the societies of small states are being re-shaped by various forces outside their control, including the globalization process and climate change, rendering their governance ever more complex. These problems are not solely faced by small states, but small country size tends to lead to a higher degree of exposure to external factors. The chapters are grouped into four sections broadly covering political, environmental, social and economic governance. Governance is influenced by many, often intertwined, factors; the division of the book into four parts therefore does not detract from the fact that governance is multifaceted, and such division was based on the primary focus of each particular study and its main disciplinary background. The expert authors have, moreover, used a variety of approaches in the studies, the subject of small states being well suited to scholarly work from different disciplines using qualitative, quantitative and mixed approaches to arrive at useful conclusions.

This book outlines the history of squatting in Sweden and analyzes the conditions under which squatting has intensified and declined in the country between 1968 and 2017. With close attention to the relationship between civil society and the state in the Swedish context, and the manner in which this relationship, together with attendant political, media and movement-based discourses, shapes the possibilities that exist for collective action, the author draws on two key concepts - those of the narrative of consensus and discourse - to present an analysis of squatting as a form of contentious politics and the "successful" story of civil society development as decisive for its emergence and development in the country. A study of the way in which confrontational actors question both the property relations inherent in capitalism and the authority of the welfare state and its institutions, Contentious Politics and the Welfare State will appeal to social scientists with interests in urban studies, political sociology, squatting, social movements and the relationship between the welfare state and contentious social actors.

This book outlines the history of squatting in Sweden and analyzes the conditions under which squatting has intensified and declined in the country between 1968 and 2017. With close attention to the relationship between civil society and the state in the Swedish context, and the manner in which this relationship, together with attendant political, media and movement-based discourses, shapes the possibilities that exist for collective action, the author draws on two key concepts – those of the narrative of consensus and discourse – to present an analysis of squatting as a form of contentious politics and the “successful” story of civil society development as decisive for its emergence and development in the country. A study of the way in which confrontational actors question both the property relations inherent in capitalism and the authority of the welfare state and its institutions, Contentious Politics and the Welfare State will appeal to social scientists with interests in urban studies, political sociology, squatting, social movements and the relationship between the welfare state and contentious social actors.