Description
This paper intends to bridge the emerging field of anti-fascist IR with the study of the politics of land and housing. As Alberto Toscano has argued, fascist intellectual theory and practice is closely connected to imperial and colonial theorising and practice. Both demand and require a form of lebensraum, or ‘living space’, for subjects who are seen to be under threat of replacement. Unlike classical liberal imperialism, however, European fascist thought has tended to oppose the (neo)liberal politics of land and housing, in which private property is paramount. How, then, to distinguish an anti-colonial housing and land politics from an anti-fascist one?
This paper asks how contemporary fascist movements envisage land and housing and, by implication, property, differently from how liberal imperialists do. It does so by looking not solely to European fascist thought, but also to fascistic forms of thought and practice outside of Europe such as in the USA, India, and Brazil. How do fascists and neo-fascists, from Steve Bannon to Narendra Modi, understand housing, the housing market, and private property more generally? Is there a unified contemporary fascist theory of the home that differs from that of the mid 20th century? How do such fascists understand ‘the commons’? Overall, I show why it is important for scholars of the international and activists focused on transforming land and housing politics to move beyond a critique of liberal imperial politics and toward a closer analysis of fascist theory and practice.
