© 2016 East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies (ewjus.com) ISSN 2292-7956 Volume III, No. 2 (2016) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21226/T2DW2S Review Essay Property, Predation, and Protection Paul Babie The University of Adelaide Stanislav Markus. Property, Predation, and Protection: Piranha Capitalism in Russia and Ukraine. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. xii, 244 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $95.00, cloth. hat is property? It is neither what it may first appear nor what we are first told it might be. Let me explain. What property first appears to be is a means of allocating goods and resources. Typically, philosophers and other social and legal theorists begin by saying that property is a system whereby scarce resources—usually everything that people can either see or imagine—are allocated amongst individuals (individuals can be natural— you and me; and legal—corporations). It is often difficult to work out how a system of property achieves the initial allocation of a particular good or resource. For that reason, those who acquire a good or resource on that initial allocation are sometimes said to have won the lottery of enjoying the resource. Joseph William Singer calls this initial allocation of a resource a “magic moment” (Singer 172; drawing on Nozick 151-64), aptly capturing the mystical and mystifying way in which the law allows some to end up as “haves” while others, usually a large majority, end up as “have nots.” Having allocated a resource, a system of property also provides a secure means of using it, allowing the holder to prevent others from using it or from interfering with the holder’s use and disposal of it. And all of this, in liberal terms, is to allow the holder to exercise those rights so as to suit one’s own preferences. These rights and their preference-satisfying exercise are supported by justifications offered for why the magic moment of allocation is just and ought to be that way—these usually include first possession, just deserts, efficiency, justified expectations, and other leading arguments of the liberal pantheon of justifications for why the world ought to be divided up the way that it is. From these justifications emerge some oft-rehearsed assertions about what property will be or, more accurately, what it will do for a state. It is usually said by those driving the global neo-liberal and rule-of-law agendas that property and, more specifically, private property (that form which is W