Focaal

Across the globe, the acquisition and exploitation of property has become a defining feature of capitalism. A central pillar of middle-class aspiration and ideology, property carries the promise of security, propelling its pursuit even as prices rise disproportionally to wages. This drive to own occurs amid highly unequal property markets and contributes to their destabilization—the market volatility produced by financialization and speculation. Arguing that property markets are characterized by divergent and conflicting temporalities, this introduction directs ethnographic attention to the complex temporal work of “achieving” and “fixing” ownership of land and housing among middle class actors across a range of ethnographic contexts. Timing property captures efforts to reconcile the temporal dissonances that property generates, a predicament in which social actors have limited control.

This article examines the intersection between market and biographical time among Romanian middle-class mortgage homebuyers. I discuss how the aspirational timing of a house purchase requires orchestrating intergenerational transfers and employment terms, with specific temporal considerations and financial flows. In contrast to the recent increase in scholarly interest in the role of in-vivo intergenerational transfers in house purchases and, consequently, a reconfiguration of inter-middle-class inequalities, I argue that the post-financial-crisis emphasis on affordability in accessing mortgages also highlights the role of employment in shaping access to credit. In this way, material transfers between generations and stable incomes become necessary conditions for mortgaged homeownership and the achievement of adulthood in a normatively defined time frame.

On the urbanizing outskirts of Nairobi, where public land registries are open to manipulation by private interests and land prices are skyrocketing, this article explores how middle-class aspirations for property ownership are confounded by experiences of fraud and deception. In a context where ownership documents are duplicated and land is double-sold, buyers and landowners desperately try to resolve these tensions, pursuing documentary evidence of land ownership as temporal “fixes,” guarantees that land will not “become double” at a future point in time, revealing alternative claims. The article concludes by showing how anxious subjectivities linger in the knowledge that “faith in paper” remains a precarious ward against land grabbing. The article argues that this constellation is indicative of capitalism's general tendency to undermine middle-class property-owning ideology.

This article argues that low- and middle-income renters and aspiring homeowners in Ireland are still living in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis. They struggle to access home ownership and secure, high-quality housing, a situation that has material and existential consequences. Drawing on the notion of “generativity,” and the literature on the “moral economies” of housing, it theorizes the housing crisis as a crisis of agency and time. Interlocutors find themselves embedded in networks of undesired dependency, unable to achieve the milestones of adulthood, and feeling out of step with the right “time of life.” This article also argues that the housing crisis is politically galvanizing because it raises questions about the state's responsibility for inequality in the housing sector and society more broadly.

Speculation through enclosure and irrigation at the edges of Jordan's urban expansion into the desert has coincided in recent years with an ever-louder discourse of water scarcity, and a moral concern over the use of groundwater via illegal wells, eroding the viability of small-scale agriculture. Tracing a specific case of a speculative gambit and placing it in relation to a nearby agricultural community experiencing the disastrous effects of water scarcity, I explore how rural and peri-urban Bedouin anxiously anticipate various uneasily coexisting futures around land and water, between personal enrichment and wider social and environmental ruination.

Time under capitalism is charged with value, rewarding those who can pace themselves according to opportunities it opens up. Property activates them along its own temporality, whereby restraint and sacrifice in the present, for those who can afford it, makes sense in terms of future returns. A temporal agency times and exploits resources like money, credit, a stable income, and a reliable political and legal institutional environment, for relative advantage. But what happens to such agency when time is out of whack? This is the context for the property pursuits described in this Theme Section as, indeed, in most contemporary contexts. The afterword unpacks the conditions for a property-related temporal agency and its transformation into speculation.

Practices of subleasing and borrowing delivery app accounts are spreading among platform-based food couriers in Spain. This article engages the significance of these seemingly neglectable practices among couriers in deportable situations. Both celebratory and critical portraits of the platform revolution have tended to ignore the question of migration in the digital gig economy. Based on interviews to unregistered couriers, accompanied by media analysis on Glovo, the main delivery company in Spain, this article calls for engaging migration beyond the exception in platform research agendas. The overall argument points to the primacy of migration in the reconfiguration of delivery platform logics of labor recruitment.

Emerging literature on humans’ ethical relations with soils is theoretically well-situated to describe human–soil relations, yet its flat ontological presuppositions are analytically disadvantaged in explaining their conditioning. By exploring farmers’ soil management in Jæren and Østfold, Norway, this article seeks to enrich the growing literature in arguing that it is necessary to analytically explain how soil care is structurally conditioned (through, for example, political economic and epistemic mechanisms) and suggests that a critical realist approach is a fruitful fundament. Attention to conditions can unlock the analytical and political potential for investigating and encouraging alternative forms of soil care that seek to deal with soil degradation through its transformation.

The specter of security is haunting politics. In “north” and “south,” on left and right, security is replacing neoliberalism as a dominant political logic. Despite a wealth of securitization studies, we have not yet fully grasped this shift and its political ramifications. Here we consider security's rise to dominance in three contexts: first, the “postsocialist transition” in Latvia and the demise of Soviet socialism, which facilitated the wider neoliberal takeover; second, Swedish social democracy, which soon succumbed; and third, Anglo-Saxon university culture, where many of the resultant political struggles have played out. In all cases, a form of security “protectionism” stepped in as a solution to neoliberal malaise: yet in practice it has offered an even more far-reaching shift in power relations than neoliberalism before it.

Security has become the defining political category of the present. Andersson and Dzenovska, like many others, have correctly diagnosed this historical shift. Yet where their article falls short is in its lack of a political vision for how to oppose the creeping securitization of everything. Indeed, what the authors offer is a kind of retreat into an anti-identity-politics brand of academic politicking which sees “trigger warnings” and attempts at creating “safe spaces” for marginalized students as the problem. This of course also troublingly mirrors the present (increasingly global) right-wing politics of anti-wokeness. The authors give us a critique of an amorphous “left,” which has supposedly capitulated and retreated into “harm management” and the “politics of injury.” While the authors are correct in arguing that it should be the task of critical scholars and activists to oppose hegemonic logics of security, what is lacking is a more serious engagement with anti-imperialist and abolitionist political movements and political thinking that have long critiqued “security” and offered radical alternatives. In this short response article, I offer a brief rebuttal to Andersson and Dzenovska's more problematic points, while also building on what I think is most useful in their article. Indeed, their project of opposing security formations is an urgently important one for the discipline of anthropology, the critical social sciences, and indeed academic institutions in an era of increasingly open fascist assaults on universities, carried out by the emboldened right wing authoritarian movements that have captured the state, not only the US, but increasingly globally. Yet, in order to coherently articulate an anti-security politics, critical scholars and activists must attend to the question of what ought to take its place. I ground my response to this question by turning to Black radical and abolitionist thinkers who have long opposed security states and who have variously articulated politics of self-defense, mutual aid, autonomy, and radical care as alternatives to punitive security regimes. As abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba often argues, if we want to build a world without police (and the kinds of repressive security institutions at stake here), then we must develop alternative practices of safety (Kaba 2021)—this is what is meant by the abolitionist adage “we keep each other safe.”

Ruben Andersson and Dace Dzenovska have written a provocative article about security “protectionism,” which, they argue, is a new paradigm sweeping through contemporary politics. Like Frédéric Gros (2014) a decade ago, they declare that ours is the age of security. The ethnographic evidence supporting their claim is a linear biographical description of the shift from neoliberalism to security in Sweden and Latvia. Elsewhere, they attach the “protectionism” label to various phenomena, from social justice activism to elite university students demanding so-called safe spaces. While we applaud their venturesomeness, we are concerned that they are labeling complex processes without explaining them. Here we respond by raising three concerns: firstly, about how anthropology frames and studies security; secondly, how security is nested in political economy; and, thirdly, its relationship with freedom. We hope to provoke further discussion and encourage Andersson and Dzenovska to follow up on this article.

Setha Low, Mark Maguire, and Zoltán Glück have given us plenty to think about, but taken together, their commentaries also demonstrate why our intervention is needed. To put it briefly, Glück's insistence on fighting security through safety is an exemplary case of the type of thinking that we challenge by focusing on shared political logics across divergent contexts. In turn, Low and Maguire's argument for more ethnographic grounding would be well heeded by Glück when he proposes a political—as distinct from analytical—program without sufficient consideration of historical specificity.