Political Power Between Global Capital and Territorial Sovereignty: The “Flamingo Revolution” Protests in Albania
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v19n3p1035-1050Keywords:
Albania, economic globalism, political power, territorial sovereigntyAbstract
The literature reveals a significant gap in understanding how political power is perceived and configured under conditions of real or imagined threats posed by globalization, particularly in semi-peripheral contexts where global capital penetrates territorial sovereignty. This article addresses that gap through the case of the "Flamingo Revolution", the protests triggered by the Albanian government's agreement granting the island of Sazan for elite tourism development. Building on a literature review that conceptualizes political power as liquid and elusive, the study employed non-participant observation of protest-related Instagram pages and online newspapers, analyzing the material inductively through qualitative content analysis. The findings show that protesters delegitimized political authority by opposing a personalized, mobile power, perceived as an intermediary of extraterritorial forces, to a normative conception of territorial stewardship in which nature and public land operate as a language of sovereignty. Confronting the political anomic opacity, they mobilized time and space - historical precedent and threatened territory - to reconfigure power as impersonal and predictable, while also drawing on transnational repertoires of meaning.
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