A few years ago there was a legal debate about who actually owns the moon and space. That sounded theoretical, but it was about specific interests. Luxembourg had rushed ahead and ascribed itself space rights that were disputed by other states. There was now also a dispute about which legal standard should be used to judge this question. Property rights to the world's oceans, for example, were used as a yardstick. It remains to be seen whether raw materials will actually be mined on the moon. In the meantime, the Brazilian rainforest is becoming more and more privately owned by settlers, who are decimating it with slash and burn. Brazilian President Bolsonaro has made it clearthat he expects a financial contribution from the world to save the jungle. Conversely, does the global community also have a right to have the green lungs of the earth protected by Brazil? With climate change, the ownership of previously unregulated natural common goods has also come into the discussion and the question arose whether our current property system is too strongly geared towards the wear and tear of things.

Thomas Thiel

Editor in the features section.

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The emergence of new forms of ownership, especially in the context of the ecological change, was the inspiration for the establishment of the Collaborative Research Center “Structural Change in Property”. The SFB, which brings together five universities and is headed from Jena, wants to put the analysis of property back on a sociological basis. If the first thief at Rousseau was still clearly recognizable as the one who drew a fence around a piece of land and said "This is mine", it is much more difficult today to say who is legally entitled to something. Are the central banks also thieves if they deprive savers of expected profits through low key interest rates? One can only answer this question if one includes the social dimension: the importance of the saver for a stable social order and the resulting importance of the guarantee,that he will be rewarded for his savings.

“In sociology, the question of ownership has long been forgotten,” says Tilman Reitz, who, along with Silke van Dyk and Hartmut Rosa, is one of the three spokespersons for the SFB.

The institution of property itself has not been touched since the post-war period and the focus has been on the overlying issues of distribution.

Reitz sees a turning point in the collapse of communism, which upset property relations in the east.

He had joined the wave of privatizations that had started in the late 1970s.

A separate project is dedicated to the transformation.