Atossa Araxia Abrahamian – författare

NAMED ONE OF THE TOP 5 BOOKS OF 2024 ON CBS SUNDAY MORNING

ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2024

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

"Vivid, revelatory, and politically unpredictable What bothers Abrahamian, in the end, isn't the anarchic but the unfair; if capital is free, people deserve the same respect." -Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker

"A season of unrest looms ahead, and The Hidden Globe lays out the unvarnished truth in a luminous feat of reportage."-Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist's riveting account exposes a parallel universe that has become a haven for the rich and powerful.

A globe shows the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens' rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and corporations.

Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity: bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space. By mapping this countergeography, which decides who wins and who loses in the new global order-and helping us to see how it might be otherwise-The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.

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 eople, 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.