Thesis (doctoral)--Technische Universität, Dresden, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-154).

The central tenet of tracing theory is that in certain circumstances it is possible to show that one asset stands in the place of another, such that any claims in relation to the original asset can be transmitted to its substitute. Since at least 2001 academic and judicial orthodoxy has been that this is done by following the path of value from one asset to the other, and can be aided in more complex cases by the application of evidential rules or presumptions. These ideas are at the heart of existing accounts of proprietary claims against trustees who deal with trust assets without authority, and personal and proprietary claims against strangers to the trust. They are also at the heart of calls to 'unify' the rules of tracing at law and in equity, removing existing distinctions drawn between claimants who are owed fiduciary duties and those who are not. In this thesis it is argued that there are no independent processes of following and identifying value, and that the language of 'tracing value' has lent the appearance of neutrality and conceptual unity to disparate heads of fiduciary and non-fiduciary liability. Most importantly, it has led to the assumption that in any case in which a claimant can demonstrate that a series of transactions links some right in the defendant’s hands with a right previously held by or for the claimant, the claimant can claim that right. In this thesis it is argued that far from creating an arbitrary practical obstacle for claimants seeking to trace and locate value, the fiduciary relationship is at the heart of the justification for any claim that exists to a new right in the hands of someone else.

This thesis is an ethnography of the practice of property restitution in post-war Kosovo. The site of the largest European Union rule of law mission (EULEX) outside its member states, Kosovo is a paradigmatic case of liberal interventionism and state building under the banner of human rights. The thesis is based on 14 months (May 2012 to July 2013) of multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork in and around the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA), the administrative, mass claims mechanism put in place by the UN to adjudicate war-related property claims between 2006 and 2016. Working with claimants and respondents, administrative clerks, national and international lawyers, commissioners and Supreme Court judges, this study presents novel insights into the everyday workings of the law from within an institution that remained largely closed to the public eye. I investigate the ways in which property, and property rights were reconfigured in post-war Kosovo through the processing of claims at the KPA. To understand how restitution worked, I probe the practices of technical-legal knowledge production by examining key moments of mass claims adjudication: the reframing of grievances in the language of the law, the making of institutional, legal knowledge, the legal analysis of files, and the implementation of decisions. Through this, I look at the consequences of the juridification of normative ideals (human rights and the rule of law) on the restitution process, its protagonists, and the law itself. My ethnographic material suggests rethinking the value of binary analyses of victims and perpetrators, the universal and the vernacularised, 'law of the books' and 'law in action', the extraordinary and the ordinary, and traces the everyday production of 'rough justice'. Building on current debates in anthropology of law on the bureaucratisation of human rights, transitional justice, and legal practice, my research reveals the tensions between the ideals of human rights that underpin the process of property restitution and the legal and political realities of transition.

abstract: Ethno-nationalist politicians and criminals in Mostar espoused a discourse of ethno-exclusionist sociocultural relations as a superstructure for the public in order to establish ethnocratic kleptocracies where they concealed their criminal colonization of residential and commercial property through manipulating the pre-Bosnian War discourse on property relations. This is not to argue that some or most of these politicians and criminals did not believe in their virulent nationalist rhetoric, but instead that the effects of the discourse created well-used pathways to personal, not community, wealth. Elites used the Yugoslav economic crisis and perceived past grievance to enflame growing tensions between ethnicities and social classes. I use Mostar as an object of analysis to examine the creation of Bosnian Croat and Bosniak ethnocratic regimes in this divided city. However, I focus more on the Bosnian Croat regime in the city because it envisioned Mostar as its capital, making the city the site of its political competition among factions. Even though ethno-nationalist politicians and criminals still hold a level of power in Mostar, the IC did succeed in instituting a high level of property restitution, which does not necessarily imply return, because the IC was able to impose rule of law when it acted in an organized manner. Also, the ethnocratic regimes were weakened due to regional economic and political factors that undercut the regimes' hold over the population. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2013

In order to fill a gap in the literature and illustrate what a public debate on religion might look like in a country as unchurched as the Czech Republic, this thesis conducted thematic content analysis on two parliamentary debates related to church property restitution. Transcripts of the debates in The Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic on the 2012 Church Property Restitution Bill and the 2017-2019 Proposal to Tax Church Property Restitutions were used to answer theoretically and empirically informed questions pertaining to secularisation. The finding was that it was not religion necessarily, but rather matters of finances, legality, and procedure that figured quite prominently in the debate. Despite this, closer analysis revealed some relevant reflection on religion, most notable on in what sort of relation should churches and religious communities be with the state. The main takeaway from the research is that Members of Parliament acknowledged low individual level religiosity and did not promote something resembling the concept of vicarious religion. There speeches were on the whole interpreted to be more in line with advocating secularisation, rather than desecularisation.