
The Cosmopolites
The Coming of the Global Citizen
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian(Author)
Columbia Global Reports (Publisher)
Published on 26. November 2015
Book
Paperback/Softback
162 pages
978-0-9909763-6-3 (ISBN)
Description
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 Caribbean. But 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, St. Kitts, 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.
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 Caribbean. But 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, St. Kitts, 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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 190 mm
Width: 123 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
190 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-9909763-6-3 (9780990976363)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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E-Book
11/2015
Columbia Global Reports
€8.49
Available for download
Person
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is an opinion editor at Al Jazeera America, a longtime editor and contributor at The New Inquiry, and a contributing editor to Dissent magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, the London Review of Books, and other publications. She has also worked as a general news and business reporter for Reuters. She grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, and studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Columbia University, where she returned to study investigative reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Brooklyn.