Product details
- Categories: Citizenship
- Publisher: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
- ISBN: 9780674248649
- Binding: Paperback
- Number of pages: 336
- Language: English
Summary
The first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship,
examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them,
and the normalization of a once shadowy practice.
Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our
rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely
easy. But for those with the means—billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho Low, but also countless
unknown multimillionaires—it’s just a question of price.
More than a dozen countries, many of them small islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and
South Pacific, sell citizenship to 50,000 people annually. Through six years of fieldwork on four
continents, Kristin Surak discovered how the initially dubious sale of passports has transformed into
a full-blown citizenship industry that thrives on global inequalities. Some “investor citizens” hope to
parlay their new passport into visa-free travel—or use it as a stepping stone to residence in countries
like the United States. Other buyers take out a new citizenship as an insurance policy or to escape
state control at home. Almost none, though, intend to move to their selected country and live among
their new compatriots, whose relationship with these global elites is complex.
A groundbreaking study of a contentious practice that has become popular among the nouveaux
riches, The Golden Passport takes readers from the details of the application process to the
geopolitical hydraulics of the citizenship industry. It’s a business that thrives on uncertainty and
imbalances of power between big, globalized economies and tiny states desperate for investment. In
between are the fascinating stories of buyers, brokers, and sellers, all ready to profit from the
citizenship trade.
Contributor Bio
Kristin Surak is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and
Political Science. She is the author of Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice and
writes for the London Review of Books, the Washington Post, and The Guardian
examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them,
and the normalization of a once shadowy practice.
Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our
rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely
easy. But for those with the means—billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho Low, but also countless
unknown multimillionaires—it’s just a question of price.
More than a dozen countries, many of them small islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and
South Pacific, sell citizenship to 50,000 people annually. Through six years of fieldwork on four
continents, Kristin Surak discovered how the initially dubious sale of passports has transformed into
a full-blown citizenship industry that thrives on global inequalities. Some “investor citizens” hope to
parlay their new passport into visa-free travel—or use it as a stepping stone to residence in countries
like the United States. Other buyers take out a new citizenship as an insurance policy or to escape
state control at home. Almost none, though, intend to move to their selected country and live among
their new compatriots, whose relationship with these global elites is complex.
A groundbreaking study of a contentious practice that has become popular among the nouveaux
riches, The Golden Passport takes readers from the details of the application process to the
geopolitical hydraulics of the citizenship industry. It’s a business that thrives on uncertainty and
imbalances of power between big, globalized economies and tiny states desperate for investment. In
between are the fascinating stories of buyers, brokers, and sellers, all ready to profit from the
citizenship trade.
Contributor Bio
Kristin Surak is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and
Political Science. She is the author of Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice and
writes for the London Review of Books, the Washington Post, and The Guardian