Dispossession is a foundational concept in analysing power dynamics, property relations, and precarity. Across disciplines, scholars explore dispossession as a materially grounded phenomenon that transforms land, labour, bodies, and resources. Karl Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation provides a pivotal framework, describing the historical processes that forcibly separated people from their means of subsistence, converting communal or subsistence-based systems into capitalist relations of production. This transformation involved the expropriation of land—exemplified by the enclosure of commons—and the displacement of peasant populations.¹ Thus, dispossession is fundamentally material, entailing the violent reorganisation of physical spaces, resources, and labour into commodities for capitalist exploitation.

David Harvey builds on Marx’s framework through the concept of “accumulation by dispossession,” emphasising its persistence in neoliberal capitalism.² Harvey identifies privatisation, financialisation, and gentrification as modern iterations of dispossession. For example, the privatisation of public goods, such as water and healthcare, constitutes a material reconfiguration of resources into commodities for profit. Harvey underscores the materiality of dispossession by linking it to the tangible redistribution of wealth, land, and infrastructure. These processes highlight how dispossession perpetuates inequalities by systematically transferring public assets to private hands.

Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou expand the concept, arguing that dispossession shapes not only material realities but also subjectivities. They describe dispossession as a condition of vulnerability and dependency that emerges through precarity and displacement. While focusing on the ontological aspects, they also emphasise the material conditions underpinning these experiences, such as the loss of homes or livelihoods. They write: “Dispossession can be a term that marks the limits of self-sufficiency and establishes us as relational and interdependent beings. Yet dispossession is precisely what happens when populations lose their land, their citizenship, their means of livelihood, and become subject to military and legal violence”.³ This dual focus on material deprivation and existential vulnerability broadens the understanding of dispossession to encompass both physical and symbolic losses.

Silvia Federici connects dispossession to social reproduction, examining how neoliberal capitalism exploits unpaid care work and community resources. Federici highlights how dispossession disproportionately impacts women and marginalised groups reliant on communal forms of social reproduction. Dispossession is said to occur through the expropriation of social reproduction, where costs are transferred onto women and marginalised communities as labour and care are commodified.⁴ This perspective underscores the material consequences of dispossession, such as the erosion of public services and displacement of vulnerable populations, disrupting the networks and spaces essential for sustaining life. Federici’s feminist approach foregrounds the exploitation of care labour as a central mechanism of dispossession.

Anthropologists like Tania Murray Li analyse dispossession in the contexts of colonialism and capitalist expansion, focusing on its material and cultural consequences for Indigenous and rural communities. Dispossession in these settings involves the loss of land, cultural autonomy, and sovereignty. Li’s work reveals how capitalist relations displace Indigenous ways of being, leading to ecological degradation and the destruction of local economies.⁵ For instance, colonial enclosures and resource extraction alienated communities from their land, reconfiguring economies and ecosystems. Similarly, Glen Coulthard critiques settler colonialism as an ongoing form of dispossession, highlighting how legal and institutional mechanisms commodify land for settler benefit. He links these dynamics to Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, emphasising the violent transformation of social and material relations under capitalism.⁶ By connecting dispossession to colonialism, Coulthard and Li illuminate its enduring material impacts on Indigenous communities, from ecosystem loss to the disruption of cultural and economic autonomy.

Urban studies further expand on dispossession through the analysis of housing and spatial transformations. Processes like gentrification and the privatisation of public spaces systematically displace low-income and racialised communities. These material transformations often manifest in the demolition of affordable housing and the commercialisation of public parks.⁷ Ananya Roy describes urban dispossession as the reconfiguration of material spaces to align with capitalist interests, displacing communities unable to afford these restructured environments.⁸ Additionally, Wilhelm-Solomon explores how eviction and displacement in precarious urban spaces lead not only to economic loss but also to a depletion of collective capacities and political mobilisation, referred to as ‘depotentiation’. The material outcomes—homelessness, loss of community spaces, and inequitable access to infrastructure—are central to this form of dispossession.⁹  

Whether through the alienation of land, the commodification of labour, or the destruction of ecosystems, dispossession operates by reconfiguring resources and spaces to prioritise capitalist interests. It operates through physical violence, legal mechanisms, and economic policies that strip individuals and communities of access to essential resources.