Statecraft Through Land: Land Abandonment and Land Theft in Russian Property Regimes

Abstract Debates in International Relations have long examined the territoriality of political authority, yet they often focus on state borders through which territorial power is assembled. This paper brings land into these debates by examining how land governance operates as a mode of statecraft in its own right. While the territorialization of land ownership through cadastral records, land registries, fences, and lines on the map appears mundane and uniform, it often enables uneven forms of territorial control. Russian property regimes make these dynamics especially visible. The paper analyzes how land governance is mobilized within Russia’s state territorializing projects by tracing policies that target land abandonment: large swaths of land left fallow, misused, or absent from state administrative records as a result of unfinished land privatization reforms. I argue that uneven efforts to render land abandonment legible through surveying and registration have not resolved uncertainty so much as reproduced it as a governing condition. Vast stretches of land have either fallen through the cracks of administrative systems or remained deliberately outside legal records, to be later reclaimed as sites of opportunity, informal state leasing practices, or outright land theft. By tracing the relation between land abandonment and land theft, the paper shows how property operates as a territorial technology that simultaneously organizes and disorders space. In doing so, it links the internal administration of land to broader questions of sovereignty and the production and dismantling of political authority.