Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist's riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. The map of the globe depicts the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that bestow and restrict the rights of the citizens and entities within their borders. For wealthy individuals and corporations, however, borders are porous, and the globe is pockmarked with thousands of special zones that exist beyond any nation's control, for their benefit. And for those at the opposite end of privilege, the map fails to prevent exploitation by foreign powers, or willfully creates cracks where refugees fleeing war and hardship can be captured and kept in stateless limbo indefinitely.&nbsp; In this fast-paced and fascinating narrative, Atossa Abrahamian explores this parallel universe. Starting in thirteenth-century Switzerland, where a confederation of poor cantons marketed the commodity they had--bodies, in the form of mercenaries--she stalks the legacy of statelessness around world, from an Emirati-owned port in Somalia to the new charter cities, semi-autonomous city-states in poor countries like Honduras that are controlled by foreign governments or multinational corporations, to Luxembourg, which wants to use its tiny perch to send capitalism into outer space via asteroid mining. Along the way, we meet the shadowy CEOs, visionary statesmen, eccentric theorists, prize-winning economists, and alarming ideologues who are the masterminds of this parallel order. By mapping the hidden geography that increasingly determines who wins and who loses in the new global order--and how it might be otherwise--The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

ABRAHAMIAN, Atossa Araxia

Reference

Riverhead Books

The buying and selling of citizenship has become a legitimate, thriving business in just a few years. Entrepreneurs are renouncing America and Europe in favor of tax havens in the Caribbean with the help of a cottage industry of lawyers, bankers, and consultants that specialize in expatriation. But as journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian discovered, the story of twenty-first century citizenship is bigger than millionaires buying their second or third passport. When she learned that mysterious middlemen had persuaded the Comoro Islands to turn to selling citizenship as a new source of revenue, she decided to follow the money trail to the Middle East. There, she found that officials in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates had bulk-ordered passports for their bidoon, or stateless population, transforming these men, women, and children without countries into Comorian citizens practically overnight. 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 show us how transactional and unpredictable national citizenship in the twenty-first century can be.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (Columbia Global Reports)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Columbia Global Reports

CITOYENNETES A VENDRE

Literature & Fiction

LUX CANADA

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