Zaira TiZiana Lofranco Minorities and Housing Entitlements in Shifting Political Systems: Legal Provisions and the Experience of Displaced Sarajevans This paper will approach the issue of urban change in post-socialist cities by analysing the legal and socio-cultural norms that regulated prop- erty relations in the Sarajevo area from the 1990s onwards. anthropologists have been acknowledged the centrality of housing dynamics in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) as a peculiar feature of the conlict that took place be- tween 1992 and 1995 on Bosnian-Herzegovinian territory. The Danish an- thropologist anders Stefansson used the expression “house war” to describe a conlict dominated by “door to door violence” that aimed to achieve eth- nic homogenisation of territory, population, and governing powers aligned with the ethnic cleansing ratio. 1 This war-centred analysis considered cul- tural transformations in the housing ield as a clear effect of military and paramilitary violence, and of the forced geographical and social mobility this entailed for citizens. as a consequence, the impact of the legal reform on Sarajevan housing dynamics has been neglected by anthropology, and the extensive theoretical literature on property relations, produced during ieldwork in other post-socialist countries, remains unapplied to the Bos- nian-Herzegovinian context. The paper thus analyses the legal aspects of housing regulation from the perspective of this anthropological literature that deems it misleading and ethnocentric to study property relations as the mere relationship between the individual and the object of their posses- sion. This concept recalls the deinition of private property that is cultur- ally speciic and rooted in the development of Western European capitalist 1. a. Stefansson, “Homes in The Making. Property restitution, refugee return, and Sense of Belonging in a Post-war Bosnian Town,” International Migration, 44: 3 (2006), pp. 115-39.