The surprising and sometimes scandalous story of twenty-first-century citizenship

The buying and selling of citizenship has become a thriving business in just a few years. Entrepreneurs and libertarians are renouncing America and Europe in favor of tax havens like Singapore and the CaribbeanBut as journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian discovered, the story of twenty-first-century citizenship is bigger than millionaires seeking their next passport.

When Abrahamian learned that a group of mysterious middlemen were persuading island nations like the Comoros, StKitts, and Antigua to turn to selling citizenship as a new source of revenue after the 2008 financial crisis, she decided to follow the money trail to the Middle East. There, she found that the customers of passports-in-bulk programs were the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, oil-rich countries that don’t want to confer their own citizenship on their bidoon people, or stateless minorities who have no documentation.

In her timely and eye-opening first book, Abrahamian travels the globe to meet these willing and unwitting "cosmopolites," or citizens of the world, who inhabit a new, borderless realm where things can go very well, or very badly.


Format Häftad Omfång 162 sidor Språk Engelska Förlag Columbia Global Reports Utgivningsdatum 2015-11-26 ISBN 9780990976363