Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the transformation of property as an ethical and moral project (Cherkaev 2023) amid ecological and political changes in post-Soviet of Georgia. It analyzes negotiations of new private property rights and obligations between the state and citizens after environmental disasters.

Paper long abstract:

“The government is not the one destroying your homes. It is a landslide, nature, that is destroying your private property” – the Chairman of the Parliament responded to the villagers demanding compensation for the lost property after a large-scale landslide in 2011 in the Eastern highlands of the Republic of Georgia. Being faced with frequently occurring environmental disasters, the highlanders in Georgia used to be provided alternative housing by the government for the state-owned properties damaged by disasters in late Soviet times. The rights and responsibilities between the state and the citizens were later rearranged by the drastic privatization of state-owned assets and the new configuration of public and private, evoked by the Rose Revolution in 2003 (Rekhviashvili 2015). The rewritten social contract between the newly emerged neoliberal authoritarian state (Eradze 2022) and reinvented post-Soviet citizen (Mühlfried 2014) created new aura around property seeming to be “owned” by individuals (Tsing 2002: 97), with the state reappearing as “protector” of private property rights (Hann 2007). However, the legal security of ownership rights revealed its limitations for the people facing environmental disasters. While the disaster-affected people expect the state to compensate for the destroyed or damaged houses after the disaster, the state institutions withdraw from enforcing property rights by considering disasters something the citizens must deal with privately. I investigate the rearrangement of property rights and obligations between the "landlord" state (Bodnar 2001) and the citizen under “force majeure” by looking at how they are legally and morally negotiated in court.