In September 2021, while yachting in the Mediterranean, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner found paradise. They stopped to refuel their yacht in the Albanian port city of Durrës, around an hour’s drive from the capital, Tirana. Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister, joined them for dinner. When they met again at Davos, Rama has said, Kushner raved about Albania.
“You are an American investor,” Rama recalled telling him. “And this country is open to every American investor.”
By 2024, Kushner had announced plans to build a luxury complex on the former military island of Sazan, off Albania’s southern coast, and on nearby beaches. The artist renderings posted to Instagram depicted villas cascading down rocky slopes, their organic facades undulating against the face of the cliff. Most of the development is intended for the mainland, rather than the island. Initial documents from 2025 sketched out more than 2,500 units of one to seven bedrooms, along with a yacht club and marina for 350 superyachts (“up to and over 100 meters,” or 328 feet), a casino, an “equestrian center,” an 18-hole golf course, a nearly one-million-square-foot water park, and a shopping and leisure hub called the “Citadel.”
Local residents heard about the project on the news. For nearly two decades, they had been caught in property disputes over the same stretch of coastline with a mysterious Miami-based developer whom prosecutors and investigators had linked to organized crime. They immediately sent a letter to Affinity Partners, Kushner’s private equity firm, requesting compensation or a halt to the project until the property disputes could be resolved. They heard nothing back.
In late January 2026, a colonnade of black cars wound through the villages on the mainland across from Sazan, where, in the ecologically protected Vjosë-Nartë delta, the construction is planned. Ivanka was conducting a site visit, during which residents were instructed to stay in their homes. Later, she dined with Rama in nearby Vlorë. In late April, trucks appeared along one of the delta’s rugged beaches. The coast at that time of year is windy and wet, and mist is common over the lagoon as migratory birds return for the spring. Soon bulldozers and excavators came to lay gravel for a new road. By May 12, local shepherds, who regularly take their sheep to the area to graze, noticed that deep holes had been dug along the perimeter of the beach. A fence suddenly appeared.
For local villagers, the fence was a clear signal that whoever put it up had no intention of grinding out property disputes in court before building. After all, this was how many projects across Albania had begun. Once the churn of development begins, it rarely stops.
By the end of the month, as the weather turned warm enough for summer tourists to begin arriving, a barbed wire perimeter replaced the fence. Residents from the surrounding area came to protest, including a man who was dragged along the road by private security and punched repeatedly in the neck. Later, he told reporters that his mouth filled with blood as he was beaten. He has since been in Greece, where he works to send money home to support his sick mother and paralyzed brother.
After a recording of the assault went viral in Albania, protesters arrived in Tirana’s streets en masse. They came from across the ideological spectrum, united by the belief that this project was an example of politically connected development that repeatedly trumped protections meant to safeguard Albanian citizens. Grievances included years of disputed land seizures, ecological destruction, corruption, crumbling public services, and poor infrastructure. Protests have since continued daily, with estimated attendance reaching as high as the tens of thousands.
Soon they were calling for a new direction for the country and a new government. The movement has been dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution,” a reference to the flamingos that feed in the protected lagoon. Conservationists say the project would sacrifice one of the Mediterranean’s last surviving untouched wetlands—largely preserved by decades of communist isolation—by loosening environmental protections to clear the way for construction. It would threaten a fragile habitat not only for flamingos but also for more than 70 other endangered species, including loggerhead sea turtles, Dalmatian pelicans, and Mediterranean monk seals.
The day after the protests in Tirana began, Ivanka Trump appeared on a YouTube channel hosted by the business influencer David Senra, extolling the virtues of the planned project. “We have five miles of beachfront directly across from the island, this beautiful peninsula with a lagoon on one side, the ocean on the other,” she said. “We developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful.”
She also spoke about plans for Sazan, Albania’s largest island, which lies at the meeting point of the Adriatic and Ionian seas. During a brief period of Italian fascist control of Albania, Benito Mussolini built a villa there. Under the communist regime that followed, it was made into a highly fortified military outpost. Closed to the public for decades, the island now receives tour boats that depart regularly from the city of Vlorë, carrying visitors past abandoned military installations and ashore among thousands of decaying “mushroom” bunkers left behind by the paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha. There is no running water; sanctioned trails wind through scrub, where several healthy populations of venomous Mediterranean snakes live among rusting military debris and shattered concrete. In an area known to local sailors as “Hell’s Gorge,” unexploded artillery shells and anti-submarine mines remain scattered in the surrounding waters.
“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim,” Ivanka told Senra. “Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.”
Sazan Island may have entered the Kushners’ founding myth by chance. As a former military outpost, it remained public land, still patrolled by a small rotating military contingent. But the environmentally protected coastline along Vlorë Bay, around which many of the protests are centered, was sold.
The seller was Artur Shehu, who transferred the land for €110 million to Albania Land Development, a project-specific company within a byzantine multilayered holding structure linked to the Ivanka-Kushner development project. After a stint in Albania’s special forces in the 1990s, Shehu owned a hotel and built a casino in Vlorë. In 1997, the country dissolved into near anarchy when nationwide pyramid schemes collapsed and some 700,000 weapons entered civilian hands. Shehu fled the country two years later, when his uncle and brother were killed in a shoot-out at a bar he owned. He continued to conduct business from Miami, where he has lived since 2005. For years, Albanian authorities have alleged that, via an intermediary, Shehu used fraudulent documents to claim ownership of hundreds of hectares of coastal property, including land claimed by some 300 other local families.
According to documents recently obtained and analyzed by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, or BIRN, one of Shehu’s property claims was based on an Ottoman-language document from around 1900, at the tail end of the Ottoman period, purportedly proving that his ancestor “owned thousands of square metres of forest and grazing land.” The ownership claim, in other words, ultimately relies on a document that only a handful of modern experts familiar with a bureaucratic world that died 100 years ago could interpret. The case files say that once landownership was secured, Shehu further subdivided and transferred ownership through various means, “with the aim of obscuring their origin and making tracing more difficult.”
Shehu’s alleged intermediary in securing the land was sentenced in 2018 to three years in prison for the fraudulent acquisition of 187 hectares of land in Zvërnec, near the Ivanka-Kushner development, according to reporting in 2021 by the Miami Herald and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP. The case, however, has since continued to bounce between courts; it remains hotly contested.
From the outside, determining the legitimacy of a land claim can seem like an intractable tangle of Ottoman deeds, unreliable courts, and endless litigation. For the families caught up in these claims, the questions are ancestral and personal.
I met Agron Hyseni, a contractor and developer in Vlorë who goes by Goni, and his cousin Hyrie Luzaj, who goes by Coco, at Goni’s bar in the newly reconstructed old town of Vlorë. Sitting across from them was Bareq Sadiraj, the “mayor,” or kryetar, of Kaninë, which overlooks Vlorë from the nearby mountainside. They are all from Kaninë, where Shehu is also from, and told me they had known him and his family their whole lives.
All agreed that the development promised by the Ivanka-Kushner resort was the best thing that could happen to Vlorë. Infrastructure would come in the form of developed roads and a revitalization of Vlorë’s languishing airport. Sadiraj mostly ignored my presence, except to show me an AI rendering of a glass and steel building in the shape of an enormous two-headed eagle, the national symbol of Albania, towering over the turquoise waters of what I presumed to be the Narta Lagoon, where the resort is planned. The image bore no resemblance to the renderings I’d seen, but he thought it was a cool idea.
The group believed that the land sold to the Ivanka-Kushner development indisputably belonged to Shehu. Because their families go back generations, they suggested, they simply know the property claims are correct. A question about what should happen to the families who also claim the land that Shehu sold to the Ivanka-Kushner development project elicited a groan from the table.
“Everyone knows where everyone’s land is,” Coco explained. “Everyone knows it’s Shehu’s land. It’s not a secret.” In 1991, as Albania’s communist regime was collapsing, Coco was 15. She left Albania for San Diego, where she lived for much of the past 35 years before recently returning to her birth country. She, too, is embroiled in a land dispute. Acting as an interpreter between me, Goni, and Sadiraj, she nearly exploded at the mention of Law 7501, the regulation that redistributed land previously confiscated by the state to the people living and working on it.
“It is a disgusting law,” she said. “It has meant that I haven’t been able to get back my land—my ancestral land!”
A great deal of the confusion over land disputes in Albania can be traced back to Law 7501. Under communism, private property was nationalized, and much of it converted to collective farms. Law 7501 attempted to return land to those working it rather than to its pre-communist owners, while later laws sought to compensate those expropriated by the regime. The result was a palimpsest of overlapping claims, a mess compounded by poor records, uneven enforcement, and mass emigration. A vulnerable legal system was left to answer what should be a simple question: Who owns what?
Law 7501 has meant that for Albanians like Coco, whose family were prominent landowners before the communist period, land restitution has been a question of inheritance. They see themselves not as elites but as victims and insist that their families paid dearly under the regime. Coco recollected packaging tobacco as a young child to help her mother on a collective farm and being refused a glass of milk for her ill grandmother. Goni said he had no childhood, only labor. In their view, post-communist Albania never truly broke with the country’s communist past—they believe that former communist elites simply reconstructed themselves as new political elites while denying restitution to families whose land had been confiscated. To landowning families, today’s corruption is not a recent phenomenon but the continuation of an unfinished tradition.
Goni and Coco told me that I had misunderstood Shehu and the land issue by listening to protesters and prosecutors. They offered to take me to Kaninë to show me where his land is.
Two days later, we met at the same bar. Driving through Vlorë, construction was everywhere. Cranes loomed, and it was rare to drive more than a minute or two before spotting a skeletal concrete stack of boxes that may, someday, become a usable building. This is a common sight across Albania, especially in Vlorë, which, as the gateway to a stretch of pristine beaches called the “Albanian Riviera,” has seen a massive construction boom under Rama.
Driving from Vlorë into the steep hills where Kaninë sits, I had an immense view of the city. Its patchwork construction interrupts whole neighborhoods, while skyscrapers sprout from the ground like weeds.
We stopped at a marble fountain carved into the hillside. It read SH D KANINË 12.11.1924, and Goni and Coco said it was evidence that this was Shehu land.
Driving on, we reached a castle at the top of the mountain. It sat in ruins, its stone walls crumbled to nubs. A bulldozer puttered back and forth behind us as we walked along the ramparts. Reconstruction of the castle had been ongoing for the last year.
“Whoever owned the castle owned all the land they could see in their view,” Coco said, translating for Goni. “That’s how it used to work.”
As we drove back down into Vlorë, Coco said she wanted to drive past her own family’s land. If she were able to reclaim it, she said, she would use it to build homes for her family and develop the rest. She had been navigating the issue of ownership since returning to Albania from San Diego a year and a half ago.
“Every time I pass by, I think: Oh I want to have a home here, I want to have a home there,” Coco said. “It’s such a wild beauty.”
It really was. Every view was a dream landscape unlike any I’d ever seen. Soaring mountains plunged into turquoise waters. Vines blanketed fences and walls. Despite the ubiquitous construction, so much of Albania felt remarkably untamed.
After winding down the mountain switchbacks, we were back at the gorgeous beachfront. Driving along the Lungomare, the palm-lined waterfront promenade that has become Vlorë’s showpiece for tourism and development, Goni stuck his hand out of his Land Rover. “All of this,” he said—he gestured broadly, from the water to several buildings back—“all of this is Shehu land.”
To our right, as we drove, stretched Vlorë Bay and Sazan Island, which the Kushners have acquired at zero taxes for 99 years during development while the Albanian state takes care of water, electricity, and sewage. (Rama has insisted that this project is “a private deal between private parties which the Albanian government has nothing to do [with].”) To our left, apartment buildings in varying conditions and states of construction stretched back up onto the base of the hills.
Directly abutting Shehu’s land is Coco’s family’s land. “But we cannot get it, there are other families there,” she said. “I pass by and I look at it and I see other people on my property.”
Coco showed me the parcel of land that she has been able to reclaim. It is only a small portion of what rightly belongs to her family, she said. We passed one- or two-story homes with fences made from naked brick or concrete. Satellite dishes and clotheslines with bedsheets drying in the sun covered makeshift porches, and bougainvillea spilled over walls in pink and purple cascades.
Suddenly, we arrived at a fence surrounding an enormous pit. On the fence were renderings of two sinuous towers of glass and steel labeled LUZAJ TOWERS. Luzaj is Coco’s family name. The development’s website describes the buildings as “fluid, organic forms—resembling amoeba-like silhouettes—elegantly rising above a solid, monolithic plinth.” Just a few hundred feet from the seaside, the structure’s “elevated design maximizes sea and mountain views” from the 23 stories planned.
“Imagine, we could have built 10 of those,” Coco said. “Is it fair that it is given to other people and you own none of it?”
I didn’t know the answer to that question. It doesn’t seem like anyone in Albania does.
There was another reason Albanians viewed the Ivanka-Kushner project differently from an ordinary investment. It wasn’t simply that it was foreign capital. It was that it was American.
On June 22, 1991, just a week and a half after the communist party that had ruled since 1944 officially dissolved, an American motorcade wove its way through Albania’s capital city. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker was making the first high-level official visit to the country, and as he and his team drove through the city, the streets seemed strangely empty. But soon, on the city’s outskirts, American flags began to appear. People crowded the cars, threw flowers, and kissed the windshields. Some even tried to carry Baker’s limousine toward Tirana.
An estimated 300,000 people crammed into the central Skanderbeg Square, designed to accommodate 200,000 as the principal venue for communist ceremonies. Under Enver Hoxha, Albania had been one of the most isolated countries on Earth. Foreign travel was nearly impossible, Western broadcasts were jammed, and private property long forgotten. America existed less as a country than as an idea. When Baker arrived, he was greeted by a banner draped across the Palace of Culture that featured the Statue of Liberty and read: “Welcome Mr. Baker, Albania has been waiting for you for 50 years.”
Baker responded, “America is returning to you,” as the crowd cheered for freedom, prosperity, and hope.
Many Albanians of a certain age recall the idea of Baker arriving with a “blank check” that would underwrite Albania’s reentry into the world after near total isolation. But actual aid was far more paltry than anticipated, and the transition to capitalism proved harsher than imagined. (One contemporaneous article about the visit stated that Baker ultimately signed off on just $6 million in aid, half of it in powdered milk.)
Despite the relative meagerness of that gift, for most Albanians, the United States as a symbol of competence and leadership endures. Even in the protests in Tirana today, it is common to see protesters carrying American flags alongside the Albanian double-headed eagle. According to Gallup polls, Albania has remained one of the most steadfastly pro-American places in the world, typically ranking only behind neighboring Kosovo—which is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.
This is all to say that Kushner arrived in Albania not simply as an investor, but as the beneficiary of more than three decades of accumulated American goodwill. Many protesters I spoke to felt that Kushner’s American fame was used as a means of selling the project to Albanians; it was seen not as an uncomfortable inconvenience but as an asset.
In other words, it’s not so much that the dream of the United States has disappeared in Albania; it’s more that it has mutated. If in 1991 Baker embodied an America of diplomacy, democratic aspiration, and public institutions, in 2026, Kushner represents an America whose primary instrument is private capital. In place of diplomacy is “dealmaking.” And Albanians no longer believe that anyone will offer aid without asking for something in return. “No one does anything for nothing,” I recall Coco telling me.
Kushner is notoriously publicity-shy, so scrying his mind is a different challenge than it is with his father-in-law. But he has quietly become one of the most revealing characters of Trump’s foreign policy, both when he was in the administration and now that he works outside it as a special adviser. And the basic idea that investment is statecraft and statecraft is investment seems to be the governing rationale of his geopolitics. Speaking at a conference in Miami earlier this year, he remarked that “all countries should have a business plan.” He added, “Why don’t countries do that?”
It is an illuminating theory of government. It also says something about why Kushner seems to be constantly shuttled off to negotiate this or that crisis, which often have wildly different histories and contexts: For Kushner, every problem boils down to business. But one obvious counter to the question he poses is that countries are not companies. Or at least democratic ones aren’t. Unlike corporations, democracies are not usually organized around a single goal; they balance them. Employees do not vote on the direction of the company or its leader the way a citizen does for their country, and governments cannot simply pursue the highest return without also asking who and what bears the cost. A coastline may be more valuable as a luxury resort than as a protected area for wildlife or the rightful land of a handful of villagers. That alone doesn’t mean it should become one.
Kushner’s vision extends well beyond Albania, and has a funny way of being regurgitated by President Donald Trump, albeit in his own idiom. Speaking at Harvard in 2024, Kushner described the Gazan waterfront as “very valuable” and suggested moving civilians to a bulldozed location in the Negev desert while developers would “clean up” the strip. A year later, at a press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump suggested that the United States would “take over” and redevelop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Later, he shared a fever dream, AI-generated, rage-bait video of “Trump Gaza” that featured golden Trump heads and children dancing on a gleaming beachfront as dollars rained from the sky.
And it’s possible that Trump’s penchant for hotels has rubbed off on Kushner as well. This is the first international hotel the Kushners have publicly backed, although there was an attempt at building one in Serbia, too—on the site of the 1999 NATO bombing of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense, which stands in decay as an informal memorial and a reminder of U.S. interventionism in the region, albeit from the opposite political vantage of Albania’s. Kushner halted the project after several senior officials were charged with corruption.
In his first term, Trump said that he would cease inking new deals on branded resorts in foreign countries and would cede control of the Trump Organization to his sons Eric and Don Jr. He declared that legally he “didn’t have to do that,” but would anyway for the sake of optics against foreign influence. In Trump 2.0, the Trump Organization has explicitly abandoned that restriction. According to Forbes, Trump’s foreign licensing and development business has grown 900 percent.
But why hotels? Why is a luxury resort more of a nation-building project than, say, a semiconductor factory, a logistics hub, or a hospital? For Trump, the answer might be simple. To build a “big beautiful hotel” is to say something like, “This place is fixed now.” If a country can sustain a luxury resort, it signals that disorder has ended—that it has become habitable not just for those who live there, but for those wealthy enough to choose anywhere else. What does a luxury property promise if not a life of leisure, free from the friction of labor, strife, or conflict? For Kushner, the answer may be even simpler: A hotel offers the cool logic of an optimized asset.
“After Jared announced the deal, the prices of real estate in Vlorë had a visible jump,” Rama said, speaking to the Financial Times, arguing that an investment of more than €4 billion into a country with a total GDP of a little more than €29 billion was self-justifying. “We need super luxury in this country like the desert needs water. What you gain from 500 yachts is the same as from 40,000 budget tourists.”
In a July 2024 interview with Kushner, veteran Italian journalist Marzio Mian reported that Kushner said the project wasn’t exactly for everyone, despite Kushner’s business partner Asher Abehsera’s insistence that “everyone should have the opportunity to visit the island.” Kushner, according to Mian, seemed skeptical of that idea. “We’re creating a very, very high-end luxury product,” he said. “One of the most compelling points about the island is the ability to have privacy.”
Kushner, even as he remains one of Trump’s most unusually empowered advisers, certainly values his own privacy. Despite rarely explaining himself to the press, during the first Trump administration, Kushner presided over a portfolio that stretched from criminal justice reform to Covid vaccinations. But he became most closely associated with Middle East diplomacy. His “Peace to Prosperity” program, a $50 billion economic plan unveiled in Bahrain in 2019, hinged on the premise that investment in commercial and tourist infrastructure could create the conditions for peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In a 2021 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Kushner wrote that the Abraham Accords, arguably his most lauded diplomatic success, had exposed the Israel-Palestine conflict as “nothing more than a real-estate dispute.”
Beyond the Middle East and back in the Balkans, Kushner also played a role in normalizing economic relations between Serbia and Kosovo. To do so, the administration reportedly leaned heavily on the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC, colloquially called by some in development-finance circles “the bank of Jared,” which was created in 2019 to encourage private-sector investment in developing countries.
Whether in the Middle East or the Balkans, Kushner has repeatedly treated economic development not simply as a consequence of peace but as a tool for producing it. When the American dream in the form of Baker arrived in Tirana, Albanians imagined a blank check; instead, they received a few million dollars and shipments of powdered milk. Nevertheless, Baker’s statement that “America is returning” revealed itself to be true in one sense. Three decades later, a proxy for another U.S. administration has arrived with an actual investment proposal whose scale, at least on paper, outstrips anything Washington ever contemplated.
Kushner did not have to persuade Rama that development could transform a nation. Rama had spent years advancing his own version of that vision. But Kushner’s proposal alone could not explain why it found such an enthusiastic champion in the prime minister. To understand that, I needed to better understand the city he had spent more than a decade remaking.
If there is a single fact Prime Minister Rama wants the world to know about him, it is that he is an artist. “People can lecture me on many things—economics, legal affairs, agriculture, or health care—but there is one thing no one can lecture me on, and that is beauty,” Rama said, speaking to a reporter at Deutsche Welle.
After training as a painter in Paris, Rama became Albania’s minister of culture in 1998; he was mayor of Tirana from 2000 to 2011. As mayor, Rama transformed the city. Since becoming prime minister in 2013, he has treated architecture, design, and ambitious development as a cornerstone of economic growth and as a mechanism for reimagining Albania’s place in the world.
Between 2015 and 2025, Tirana alone approved nearly 10 million square meters (107.6 million square feet) of new construction. That’s roughly the equivalent of building 30 One World Trade Centers. Meanwhile, emigration remains high, as tens of thousands of Albanians continue to leave each year to seek economic opportunities abroad. This kind of construction is happening across the country, in Vlorë as much as in Tirana. Who is all of this being built for? And how is any of it making any money?
To explore these questions, I went on a walking tour with Redi Muçi, a young MP who has been in Parliament since last year, after leaving his post as a lecturer in engineering at the Polytechnic University of Tirana. Muçi got involved in activism in 2011, when, as a newly appointed university lecturer, he stepped out of his offices to join protests against Sali Berisha, then the prime minister, who had been implicated in several corruption scandals. When protesters clashed with police outside the prime minister’s office, the police opened fire. Four people were killed and dozens more injured. Muçi is now the only elected MP out of 140 seats to represent the “Together Movement,” a leftist party formed in 2022 from people involved in student and youth activism.
We met in Tirana near two enormous 25-story towers that dwarfed the surrounding buildings. There was a café called Mr. Chef and a dental parlor. According to Muçi, the site once housed a natural history museum, which was left to decay in the 1990s and 2000s. The road in front of it, by contrast, “is the same as it was 80 years ago,” Muçi said, only with more traffic. Most of the apartments are empty because normal Albanians cannot afford them. “This is typical,” Muçi said.
Mass construction with murky financing is common across Albania. In addition to allegedly using falsified documents to obtain the land that will be used for the Ivanka-Kushner resort outside Vlorë, Shehu has been named in an ongoing investigation by Albania’s Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Corruption, or SPAK. On June 10, SPAK announced 20 arrest warrants, froze more than €128 million in assets, and ordered the seizure of properties across Tirana and the southern Albanian coast. A SPAK court filing, summarizing information gathered by Belgian authorities, cited Shehu’s direct contact with Alfredo Hamzai, who was convicted in Belgium in a narcotics-trafficking case, and Shehu’s international travel “to participate in meetings for the purpose of organizing narcotics trafficking” as evidence that Shehu holds “a leadership position” in trafficking networks. (There is no reason to believe Kushner or Ivanka had knowledge of these allegations before purchasing the land. Neither Rama, Affinity Partners, nor Abehsera, Kushner’s operating partner, responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the development project said that, contrary to widespread reporting, Affinity Partners is not connected to it, and that Kushner and Ivanka are involved in their personal capacities. In answer to detailed questions, Shehu’s lawyer responded, “OK.”)
As we walked toward Skanderbeg Square, where Baker had stood amid a cheering crowd 35 years before, Muçi pointed out a troubling construction project every few hundred feet. There was a 60-story, half-completed building whose construction was halted due to the project’s links with drug trafficking. Another had illegally built an additional seven stories. A national theater was demolished to make way for skyscrapers. Construction on a building meant to be the tallest in the Balkans was halted, again, due to links with drug traffickers.
“I think it’s a way to transform the city, to give the aura of wealth or progress,” Muçi said. He explained that foreign investment in Albania is “very, very low, almost zero,” and cited a long list of issues that would be concerning for an investor. “Unresolved property rights, a monopolized economy that benefits so-called strategic investors, a low workforce because young people are leaving, and a host of other issues which make it not worth it, even if you’re an investor who wants to come invest here.”
We arrived in Skanderbeg Square, where Albanians had come to protest nightly for a month. Dominating the square was a skyscraper whose balconies form a familiar outline.
“Is it a face?” I asked.
It was supposed to be Skanderbeg, the medieval nobleman who became Albania’s national hero for resisting the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. “But everybody feels that this is Edi Rama’s facial features,” Muçi explained, “who wants to immortalize himself with this building.”
We counted five cranes from our view in the square. “Will these buildings be filled with rich people who have invested?” Muçi asked. “I don’t see that happening; it is only a means of transforming the facade. It is a means of money laundering and drug trafficking, but the mere fact that all these apartments remain empty, it shows that it is not for Albanians.” For land disputes, state protection is limited. “You can go to court, but nothing comes out of it,” Muçi explained.
Much of this construction was made possible by the introduction of Rama’s “strategic investment” framework of laws in 2015, which were expanded in 2024. Rather than waiting for every dispute to be resolved before construction began, the state increasingly treated private development as a matter of public interest.
The existence of these kinds of laws is not inherently remarkable. The United States has eminent domain, and many European countries have versions of mechanisms that acquire land or expedite projects in the public interest. “In a normal property system, this might simply be a development incentive,” wrote Elton Dusha, an economist in Tirana with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, in the magazine Peizazhe të Fjalës. “In Albania’s system, where ownership is often unresolved, it becomes much more powerful.” Once a project receives strategic status, like the Ivanka-Kushner resort, “the state … puts its weight behind the investor before land disputes have been fully resolved.” And this weight essentially flows directly from the Strategic Investment Committee, established by Rama and chaired by Rama himself.
It helps explain why fences and bulldozers typically arrive as a first step in construction projects in Albania, while hundreds of families still insist the land is theirs. Under the strategic investment framework, the existence of competing claims is no longer, by itself, enough to halt development. Because the underlying property law, 7501, is vague, and the strategic investment framework gives sweeping powers to push through large projects, “the government becomes the end-all and be-all of economic activity,” Dusha told me in a phone call. “If Kushner is just some guy with no connection to the government, he is a nobody.”
“Everything somehow functions outside the legal boundaries of what’s permissible and what’s not,” Muçi said. “Construction starts, it becomes a fact, and then the whole administration and the paperwork is in the service of what has already happened.” But serious investors generally want rule of law; they want limited risk on their investments. “If the property rights are not sold ... the only way to make it worth investing is if you contact the prime minister directly and somehow arrange it.”
“This is why it’s so hard to attract foreign investors in Albania,” he said, “because who would want to play by these rules?”
What Typically deters investment is uncertainty: disputed ownership, weak courts, and the possibility that political connections matter more than legal rights. For many investors, those conditions in Albania make it a risky place to do business. But Ivanka and Kushner are not most investors. Kushner arrives with not only private capital, but private capital backed by extraordinary political access; the prime minister has personally championed his project. The risks that might discourage an ordinary developer can look very different to someone whose relationship with the state is anything but ordinary.
Thirty-five years ago, the United States encouraged Albania to build institutions that could withstand the pressures of powerful individuals. Kushner has a different goal. The novelty is not that Kushner, as a representative of the Trump administration, mixes business and foreign policy. It is that, under Trump, business is the foreign policy. And it’s a business that chafes against the restraints states typically put in place to prevent the powerful from simply taking what they want.
While I was in Albania, a pink coffee-table book was released with a foreword by Rama. The Albanian Files, as it’s called, documents more than a decade of architectural projects by internationally renowned architects Rama brought in. In his foreword, Rama describes what draws the “world’s most visionary architects” to his country. It is “something alive, something unrepeatable.” But it is also that Albania is “still free from the suffocating comfort of overregulation” and offers “a freedom from ‘no’ in all its forms.”
After our tour of Kaninë, Coco and Goni took me to lunch at Shehu’s resort on the water. We walked a literal red carpet through a poolside patio to our table. The seats were tan and plush, the tables an elegant natural stone. A vanishing-edge pool looked out over the sea, Sazan Island in the middle of our view.
The chefs clearly knew us, and we were offered a lavish off-menu feast that blended old and new Albanian cuisine. I requested a glass of white wine. No one asked what kind, and the correct one simply arrived. Cubes of polenta artfully arranged with peppers, cheese, and marinated anchovies appeared, along with more courses of purple shrimp carpaccio, grilled squid in ink, black truffle pasta, ravioli with lamb ragu, and an elevated sultjash—traditional rice pudding with cinnamon. We finished the meal with an enormous plate of perfect fruits on a bed of ice, condensation pilling on their skins.
“You are sitting at the table Ivanka sat at,” Goni told me.
I asked what made them proud to be Albanian. Coco smiled as she translated. “We get down but we get back up, bigger and stronger,” she said. She took a second to laugh. “Kind of like Trump!”
Then Coco put it another way. America, she said, was Albania’s “big brother,” and the former regime looms large.
“The whole perception of the regime had a counterweight in the U.S.,” Muçi later told me. “People in Albania are not protesting because the U.S. wants to take away Sazan Island. It’s been happening across Albania for a long time. And we feel that Ivanka and Jared are there to pink-wash this typical Albanian thing.”
As of now, protests notwithstanding, the Ivanka-Kushner project is still happening. Rama has vowed to press on. “I was voted to make these things happen,” he said. “I’m not voted to be led by people that have a different idea of how to develop the country.” He has insisted that the resort could be open to visitors by the end of the decade.
At the pool, Coco and Goni told me that the allegations against Shehu were false. They said that, despite years of scrutiny from law enforcement, investigators had never been able to pin anything on Shehu. Everyone was looking, no one had found anything, and no one gets away with a crime with no traces. I didn’t know what to say. Getting away with illegal activity sounded like the definition of organized crime to me.
Goni asked me who I thought owned the pool behind us. Shehu, I presumed. “No, it belongs to the city of Vlorë,” he said. It has an entry fee, of course, but technically it is publicly owned.
I saw families lounging, speaking French, German, English, and Italian. Someone getting a scuba lesson bobbed in the water. The atmosphere was rarefied and opulent. I had a hard time imagining how locals might think the pool was accessible, let alone built for them.
Beyond the pool, a half-finished concrete structure jutted out into the sea. A fence had been put up at its entrance. As I watched, a group of teen boys casually climbed it and walked out to where the water was deeper. They took turns jumping into the clear water below. For now, I thought, this place still belonged to them.
