The Cosmopolites ― The Coming of the Global Citizen

The buying and selling of citizenship has become a thriving business in just a few years. Not only are businessmen renouncing America or Europe in favor of tax havens like St. Kitts and Antigua; also, cash-strapped and resource-poor island nations, aided by a group of mysterious middlemen, have turned to selling citizenship as a new source of revenue after the 2008 financial crisis. Their customers are oil-rich countries like the United Arab Emirates, which don't want to confer citizenship on their ownbidoon, or stateless, minorities. In her timely and eye-opening first book, journalist Atossa Araxia 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.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is an opinion editor at Al Jazeera America, a longtime editor and contributor atThe New Inquiry, and a contributing editor to Dissent magazine. Her writing has appeared inThe 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, NY.