Global Citizenship: A Discussion with Atossa Abrahamian

Tuesday, November 17, 2015
6:00pm — 7:15pm
World Room
Pulitzer Hall
Columbia University
2950 Broadway (at 116th Street)
New York, NY 10027

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Columbia Global Reports and the Committee On Global Thought welcome Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, acclaimed novelist Joseph O'Neill (The Dog, Netherland), and Columbia University Professor of Anthropology Rosalind Morris. Nicholas Lemann, director of Columbia Global Reports, will moderate a panel discussion on global citizenship, statelessness, and Abrahamian's debut book The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen. 

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 Abrahamian discovered, the story of twenty-first-century citizenship is bigger than millionaires seeking their next passport.

When she 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 MiddleEast. 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.

"A perceptive, brilliantly reported investigation into the ways in which the forces of globalization are fundamentally changing the conceptualization and practice of nationality. This is that rare thing: a book filled with news."—Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland and The Dog

"Abrahamian’s fluently told, fast-paced story takes her around the world ... A slim but powerful book of great interest to students of international law and current events."—Kirkus Reviews

Registration (required)