Introduction: Strategic entanglements - un/commoning as relational labour of articulating resource modalities.

Abstract

In the introduction to this special issue, the authors focus on 'strategic entanglements' in the study of the commons, commoning, and accumulation by dispossession. They challenge the recent scholarly focus on projects that understand themselves as outside of capitalisms or other hegemonic economic systems. Instead, Streinzer and Tošić understand social reproduction as a totality of assemblages of actors and relations of capital, labour, property, investment, kinship, state, commons and more at play. In these assemblages, the commons coexist, compromise and collaborate with other forms of resource organisation and property regimes. The special issue zooms in on how actors navigate these entanglements to create, sustain, or undo their own projects and politics. Strategic entanglements is hence a perspective that helps in understanding the interdependences of various forms of property regimes and in investigating the kinds of relational labour involved in articulating them.