The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen

Columbia Global Reports

by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Bernadette Dunne (Narrator)

'THE COSMOPOLITES' are literally "citizens of the world," from the Greek word kosmos, meaning "world," and polites, or "citizen." Garry Davis, aka World Citizen No. 1, and creator of the World Passport, was a former Broadway actor and World War II bomber pilot who renounced his American citizenship in 1948 as a form of protest against nationalism, sovereign borders, and war. Today there are cosmopolites of all stripes, rich or poor, intentional or unwitting, from 1-percenters who own five passports thanks to tax-havens to the Bidoon, the stateless people of countries like the United Arab Emirates. Journalist Atossa Abrahamian, herself a cosmopolite, travels around the globe to meet the people who have come to embody an increasingly fluid, borderless world.

Along the way you are introduced to a colorful cast of characters, including passport-burning atheist hackers, the new Knights of Malta, California libertarian "seasteaders," who are residents of floating city-states, Bidoons, who have been forced to be citizens of the island nation Comoros, entrepreneurs in the business of buying and selling passports, cosmopolites who live on a luxury cruise ship called The World, and shady businessmen with ties to Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad.


RUNNING TIME ➜ 4hrs. and 42mins.

©2015 Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (P)2020 Random House Audio

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics, Travel, Audiobook, Society, Cultural

Audible Audio

First published November 10, 2015

Reviews

[Kuang Ting · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is citizenship? The debate on “citizenship” is growing stronger in recent years. At first look, most people might think there is nothing particular to discuss. After all, citizenship merely tells your country of origin, and it determines what passport you hold for traveling. Intuitively, citizenship is just a matter of course, but it is actually a very interesting topic to explore.

The first article of United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” However, citizenship itself is not fair at all. It’s pure luck. People born in the poorest country are strugging to survive, while people born in the wealthest country enjoy extravagant lifestyle.

Citizenship also determines your freedom to move around. For example, one can travel hastle-free with an European passport, but if you hold a Somali passport, you can expect great difficulty to travel across national borders. The human rights are actually unequal since the very moment people are born. Citizenship is one example. How come such an arbitrary and random system exists at first place? Is it necessary? Is it really that bad?

Citizenship is both a moral and political question. The debate is ongoing and getting more attention gradually. Citizenship is a subtle driving force behind some global events. For example, African refugees risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. The refugees can’t even meet the basic needs in home countries (political scientist called these countries ‘failed states’). Their citizenships prevent them from living with dignity. Thus, many people choose a risky path to Europe, and wish to get a new citizenship (also a new identity) and have a normal life. As nationalism is on the rise around the world, citizenship may even lead to tensions. As general readers, I think knowing a little more about citizenship could be beneficial for us to understand crisis from a new angle.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen is a perfect primer for general readers. It is a short volume from Columbia Global Report (CGR). CGR is an imprint of Columbia University Press. The series focuses on critical issues of current interests. Every volume provides critical analysis on the topic from prominent experts. CGR is a project led by the Dean Emeritus of Columbia Journalism School (a top-tier journalsim school in the world). The topics selected are pertinent to global affairs.

The author Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is an opinion editor at Al Jazeera America. She was a former reporter at Reuters. Her works have appeared on prestigious publications such as The New York Times. Herself is also very cosmopolitan. She is the citizen of Canada, Switzerland, and Iran. Curretly, she lives in New York. She has grown up in a cosmopolitan environment. It gives her the perceptive capability to report the issues on citizenship.

In the opening chapter, Atossa shows us the history of citizenship. Greek philosophers back then already had fierce debates. In a perfect world, everyone on earth should be treated as one unified community. We are Us. We are the World. There is no need to differentiate or alienate each other. But in reality, humans started to divide into different groups, societies, or tribes. Borders were set up. Imaginative lines were drawn up. People were gradually divided.

There were many factors driving the development. It is best explained by Imagined Community, a monumental political science book by Benedict Anderson. Essentially, humans crave for belonging, so people form different communities where common values are shared. These common values are the foundation of nations as well. Every nation holds unique values.

Unfortunaltely, sometimes values go against each other and lead to war. Brute force cannot solve problems forever. In 1648, a peace treaty called The Peace of Westphalia was signed to end the infamous Thirty Years’ War. Every nation state sat down and talked. It was the origin of diplomacy. The framework they devised becomes today’s international relations.

Basically, soverign state becomes the unit to define a community. Every nation respects each other and doesn’t have the right to interfere each other’s interior affairs. This is when citizenship comes into practice. Soverign state use citizenship to determine everyone’s identity and belonging. Humans are no longer a unified whole, but split into nearly 200 fragments. It brings about some problems mentioned above.

The complex system of citizenship has some loopholes. It gives the most priviledged people great convenience. For example, billionaires may be able to arrange tax evasion and manipulative accounting schemes. On contrary, some people might become stateless. Without a formal citizenship, these people are exempt from any social welfare. They may even be illegal to live in the nation where they were born. Ironically, citizenship could also become an intricate commodity for sale!

Atossa introduces the pioneer of investment migration and citizenship-by-investment to readers. You definitely will find this special kind of ‘business model’ intriguing. It’s a bit like insurance broking, but it is citizenship being brokered. The pioneer in this field is Dr. Christian Kaelin, chairman of Henley & Partners, a global leader in residence and citizenship planning. You must have heard of Passport Index which ranks each country’s passport usefulness. Mr. Kaelin is the concept inventor.

According to the book, he has been fond of immigration laws since childhood. He would send mails to government immigration agency around the world to request immigration documents to do research. Citizenship has become his lifelong passion. To a certain extent, he invented the citizenship-by-investment industry. He has been the major advisor on such schemes in Malta, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Antigua, to name a few. He helps promote the ideas worldwide.

Most of his clients are successful entreprenuers and ultra-high-net-worth individuals who can essentially buy citizenship. To them, holding more passports can make many things easier. They can move around the globe more freely. Another citizenship may even come in handy in case of emergency (e.g. war, pandemics…)

Though a bit controversially, Mr. Kaelin offers an interesting point of view. He sees citizenship an outdated relic of ancient times. The world should be flat. Globalization is the future. Citizenship limits people’s freedom to move. Furthermore, citizenship itself is not fair. Citizenship-by-investment offers a nice alternative. His arguments make sense. However, some people still take it cautiously.

Atossa gives readers another reflecting story on citizenship. She followed the citizenship-by-investment program of Comoro Islands. The island nation set up the program to attract much needed money. However, the outcome is not totally satisfactory. Corruption and conspicuous problems abound. It doesn’t bring prosperity as once promised. It even becomes a tool for some governments to relocate stateless people and make their situation even worse.

There are more though-provoking stories in the book. Atossa’s prose is beautiful. Her observations on the citizenship issues are sharp. You will learn a lot after reading the elegant-written volume. You will have a fresh idea about being a global citizen. In a closely connected world, love and care should transcend boundaries and citizenships.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some are born citizens, some purchase citizenship, and some have citizenship thrust upon them: this, in a nutshell, provides the narrative arc to Abrahamian's wonderful little book. At its analytic core, this book is an account of the rise of the passport-sales industry, pioneered by various passport entrepreneurs, who have figured that this is a good revenue generation scheme for many impoverished island nations (she focuses on the Comoro Islands, a former French colony in the Indian Ocean, and St. Kitts and Nevis, a former British colony in the Caribbean), who often have very little else to sell. Essentially, these passport entrepreneurs arrive in these islands with a pitch for arbitraging one of the great remaining barriers within our globalizing world, namely the stolidity of citizenship, still something that the vast majority of people inherit as a birthright, much as titles are inherited by aristocrats. (Some of these citizenships are worth a great deal more than others, the Swiss being the best, and Afghan perhaps the least valuable -- measured both by the global mobility that the passport afford, as well as the social benefits the holder can claim from the state. As Sam Moyn and others have pointed out, citizenship in a particular state is the still the primary vehicle through which rights are claimed.) Many of these passport entrepreneurs combine hucksterism with ideological passion, either of a libertarian sort (claiming they are undoing arbitrary and repressive government regulations) or a humanitarian sort (claiming they are solving the problem of statelessness). Both types also claimed that, by providing a new income stream to these poor islands, they were kick-starting a development process that, in the case of the Comoros, involved imagining these islands as a future "Arab Hawaii."

Part of what is most interesting about Abrahamian's account is the varied "customers" for these passports-for-sale. On the one hand, the primary customers consist of the most privileged people on the planet, who prefer to have multiple passports, since each one comes with a particular mix of privileges -- these are the primary customers that the libertarian hucksters see themselves as serving. In this phase of the story, we seem to have a classic story about globalization eroding national sovereignties, with these passport entrepreneurs promoting themselves as avatars of modernization and global cosmopolitanism, against the atavistic mono-citizenship regimes inherited from the 20th century. Abrahamian asks some difficult questions here, about the relationship between the rights that come with citizenship and the duties that may also attend with the same, mainly to criticize the deeply unequal nature of different sorts of citizenship, as well as the absurdity of having basic political rights becoming a tradable commodity. Citizenship, far from being a universal category that provides the basis for universal human rights, turns out to be as varied in its qualities as the states that supply them. What's clear, however, is that having more passports means you have more rights, and so for many globe-trotting elites, having multiple passports represents both a convenience and a political insurance policy in case things get dicey for them in a particular locale. A foreign passport can serve as a literal get-out-of-jail-free card.

But the other category of "consumers" for these commercial passports is even more intriguing, namely the stateless, for whom the possibility of a being able to purchase a passport, and thus finally gain access to the "the right to have rights" (as Arendt put it) might seem like an unmitigated blessing. Here, however, is where Abrahamian's story turns particularly interesting, and dark. It turns out that in the case of the Comoran passports, some of the biggest customers turn out to have been the Kuwaiti and Emirati governments, which were interested in purchasing thousands of Comoran passports in order to give them to the "bidoon." The bidoon are Gulf-born residents who for various reasons -- often because their forebears had been immigrants from elsewhere -- did not claim or receive citizenship status when the opportunity arose in the postwar period. The statelessness of the "bidoon" have been a political embarrassment for years, one made worse by the progressive 'hardening" of the Gulf states' definitions of citizenship in the wake of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which was prompted in part by a desire to re-write the kinds of state and citizenship lines that the Brits and French bequeathed to the middle east as part of the postcolonial succession. In the rising commercialized passport industry, these governments saw a brilliant solution to their dilemma of what to do about these people who their legal machinations had rendered stateless: by giving them a Comoran passport, these lifelong residents of the Gulf states could now be declared visa-less foreigners, and deported.

Needless to say, this wasn't what most of the bidoon wanted themselves; what they wanted was Emirati or Kuwaiti citizenship, since these passports are far more "valuable" (For example, Kuwaiti citizens get $55K/year in direct cash transfers from their government) than those associated with some remote and impoverished Indian Ocean archipelago. Thus the great irony: the process of expanding citizenship to the undocumented, worked in practice to violate their subjective desires, while the Gulf States attempted to deploy the language of human (e.g. political) rights as a way to deflect (economic, social, and spatial) claims-making. Thus are the ironies of the liberal global human rights regime in an age where everything, even citizenship, becomes a commodity.

[Nathan Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating, thought-provoking book about citizenship in the 21st century.

The book's main story arc covers a group of stateless people known as the "bidoon", who live in Middle Eastern countries like the UAE and Kuwait. As non-citizens of the countries they inhabit, the bidoon are denied many of the benefits that full citizens enjoy.

The oil-rich Middle Eastern governments did not want to grant their own citizenship to the bidoon, so they instead hatched a fanciful scheme to give the bidoon citizenship of Comoros - a tiny, impoverished island nation thousands of miles away off the coast of Africa.

In exchange for selling Comorion passports to the bidoon in the Middle East, the Comoros would receive a much-needed injection of funds. For their part, the Arabs hoped to ease the pressure coming from the international community who were demanding they solve the bidoon's stateless status. The reader gets treated to a wonderful piece of investigative journalism around how the whole affair played out.

However, the part of "The Cosmopolites" which I enjoyed the most was the author's probing inquiry into the concept of citizenship itself in our globalizing world.

Nation-based citizenship is something which most people take for granted because it has been the only system we have really known in our lifetimes. It originated in the Treaty of Westphalia - of 1648! It might be long overdue for a shake-up. As Abrahamian writes, "The nation-state system was neither humanity's first conception of citizenship, nor will it be the last."

Given the greater international mobility many people now enjoy, their identity is often not so easily categorized into one particular place. Add to that the fact that many of the world's most crtitical challenges are global (rather than local) in scope.

In particular, the book raises two contrasting visions of those who dream of a world without borders:

First - the rejection of all citizenship and politics, going all the way back to the Cynic school of ancient Greek philosophy. In the book, this is characterised by Roger Ver, a radical libertarian tech entrepreneur who wants to opt out of interference from the state and create a kind of Galt's Gulch (of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged") where he can exist free from the reach of any goverment infringement on personal liberty (including the obligation to pay taxes).

Second - a universal concept of citizenship which envisions all humankind united under a global government. The only-slightly-less-ancient Stoic school of Greek philosophy advocates this, and so too did Garry Davis - the deceased founder of the "World Service Authority", granting the (unrecognized) World Passport.

My main criticism of "The Cosmopolites" is that I wish some of the very interesting developments in this space could have been fleshed out more. The Seasteading Institute, Bitcoin, and Estonia's e-residency were all mentioned, but only in passing.

However, "The Cosmopolites" raises some very topical questions - especially since, as Abrahamian notes, such so much of lives are now online.

I will finish this review with my favorite question the book poses: "What does citizenship become when it becomes detached from any kind of civic engagement and political identification - when it is a matter of convenience, not community? What are the states when members of a community no longer feel a particular kinship or loyalty to any particular place?"

[Wendelle]

This is a short book from Columbia Global Reports that I picked up, primarily for its length without knowing anything about its contents, but turned out to be about an interesting curiosity of a phenomenon that fits neatly within the hot-button issues and discussions of immigration, citizenship, and documentation. Basically, the book is reporting about passport-buying, or the commodification of citizenship, as it happens in two situations: the least wealthy and the most wealthy.

In the first situation, it's exemplified by the bidoon of the Gulf States and the people of the Comoro Islands. The bidoon of Kuwait and UAE, according to this book, pertain to people who are native-born within the borders of Kuwait or UAE, as their parents and grandparents were. They have lived their entire lives in these states. However, they are stateless, they are not considered citizens of these states. Usually they're of Bedouin or Balochistan origins, the Gulf states are reluctant to provide them with passports or documentation signifying official citizenship, and they are considered foreign. This is because recognizing their belonging would mean granting them the same share of generous benefits as Kuwaitis and Emiratis by birthright, such as free monetary supports and education, and granting them political representation that could overpower current status quos in their respective countries. The Gulf states then hit upon a solution: use their wealth to buy passports in bulk from a country that directly needs financial infusion, like the Comoro Islands, so as to provide the bidoon with papers, without giving them Gulf State naturalization. In return, they promised the Comoro Islands investments and development, such as tourism infrastructure and road repair. The bidoon, in a flash, then became citizens of a country they've never been to.

The second situation is of the very wealthy. These are people who are businessmen, millionaires to billionaires who hold less privileged passports, whether from the Middle East or Latin America or Africa. They can benefit from a letter of introduction from a developed country, for business and travel purposes, such as to ease their trade flows or wealth management or their children's futures. Thus they engage in the marketplace for 2nd, 3rd, 4th passports or citizenships.

[Dana Al-Basha | دانة الباشا]

As a Palestinian, I know many people without a passport, I know how hard their life is, I've seen many people go about after a war in their homeland stateless, without power or protection. When I moved to Kuwait I learned about the "Bidoon" people who are Kuwaiti without passports, but it's the same in every Arab country especially for the Bedouin tribes who lived out of society for so long.

When I saw this book in 2018, it attracted me because I like to take photos with tiles, and the title: The Cosmopolites: citizens of the world. I think if you aren't from the land you will always feel out of place wherever you go. This is the normal state of war-ridden countries. This to the rich is a beneficial world order, where the rich and the groups that stand with them are always on top of the pyramid benefiting from people's suffering and need for a home.

[Mary Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my colleagues recommended this book, though I can't recall how he or she used it or the subject matter of the class. I currently teach a writing class and am interested in using a theme of global engagement/citizenship, so this looks interesting. It's absolutely not what I was expecting.

I figured the book would be more about seeing beyond national borders to see ourselves as citizens of the entire world (thus making international concerns our own), and that was actually not far off in some ways. Abrahamian focuses on the issues of those people who are not legally or officially recognized as citizens of any country. I would argue that a significant part of the population in the US doesn't have to worry about that. I know I certainly didn't. But for people who were legally in a country until they suddenly weren't, life is close to a guessing game. The book also looks at countries who are not well off economically and how business people can take advantages by buying and selling citizenship. This is what happens when whole countries have agreements to honor the passports and citizenship of other countries. It's politically and economically convenient, and apparently it's also a pretty successful business. But countries that weren't well off to begin with still aren't well off. It's sort of like having the World Cup and Olympics in Brazil; police brutality, unemployment, political instability, and horrendous violations and rape of women aren't going away anytime soon.

I'm living in a time where my passport isn't a big deal. I mean, I can't just go live in Italy, but my passport will get me there and home, and I won't be arrested and moved to some other country that I've never known. And I don't think the possibility of a President Donald Trump will change that, necessarily. But man, we're talking a lot about borders these days, and it's worrisome that all it takes is a politician's signature that can so dramatically change the world.

There really is no closure to this issue (of course, it's still happening). But I think it really effectively brings up the concept of borders and how often we rely on them and on the ideals of nationalism. I also have to give to the author. Abrahamian does a fantastic job of relaying the information in an objective, clear, and powerful way. This isn't to say that she doesn't have a message, but she's letting the information speak for itself. I am absolutely using this book in my writing class, and I'm interested in reading more of the Columbian Global Reports. They're short, easy to read, and significant.

[mia moraru · Rating 4 out of 5]

'wealthy and white, you're an expat; hard-working and from a third-world country, you're an immigrant; poor or black or on the brink of death, you're a migrant' --- 'the sale of citizenship...speaks to the arbitrariness of the concept of belonging to a nation to begin with'

[Ben Etienne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started re-reading this book during quarantine because of the situation we're all faced in.
This book is a great read as it examines a good variety of ways citizenship has been commercialized and also in a sense weaponized.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book, but it wasn't as varied as I had expected.

[Marina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating, and very readable book about citizenship in the 21st century.

[Bastian Greshake Tzovaras · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a marvelous book! I knew virtually nothing about how citizenships are sold nowadays, by the rich who want more "useful" passports, either for international travel or to avoid taxes (e.g. did you know that one of Facebooks co-founders renounced his US-citizenship in order to avoid taxes?) as well as by the poor. Kuwait, the Emirates etc. are trying to "get rid" of their stateless population by deporting them with freshly bought passports.

Definitely gets you to think about the concept of a nation and borders, 2500 years after the first cynics and stoics hated the idea and thought of themselves as being cosmopolites.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating stuff. I wish it had expanded a little bit more to discuss global immigration trends or trends with regard to visas and passports. Nonetheless it goes into some really detailed discussions on specific issues (for example, the purchasing of Comorosian citizenship by the Kuwait government so that they could get rid of their stateless people; or, the passport industry of St. Kitts and Nevis, which now makes up around 25% of their entire GDP). Would recommend.

[Miki · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a couple of interesting story arcs in this anthology of extra-citizenship, and a tolerable minimum of filler. There's more in the way of uncritical reporting than actual analysis, though-every mention of Bitcoin makes my teeth itch.

[A. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting little book on an intriguing subject. It explores citizenship- on what it means when citizenship becomes a commodity to be sold on the market, stateless cosmopolitanism as both something for the 1% and for the stateless unfortunates like the Bidoon in Arabia. It explores how through selling passports, Comoros as a country tried (and failed) to raise revenue for development; and how this industry has become common. It is common to own multiple passports at the same time as borders have become much much stricter. Borders are a major source of inequality as the country one is a citizen of gives one certain rights and privileges which function as a source of differentiation and hierarchization from a citizen of another country. Hence, the paranoia around keeping outsiders out. However, what if this becomes citizenship for sale? Nationalism then becomes merely another commodity as borders break down and the 'deep horizontal comradeship' that the nation was imagined as begins to break apart.

Intriguing book which raises a lot of questions. The urge towards cosmopolitanism has in fact lost the moral high ground it had earlier, from the Stoics and the Cynics to thinkers like Einstein; primarily because it has become this commodity to be sold and taken advantage of by a jet-setting global elite, 'The Davos Man'. The plight of the stateless who neither have a country to go back to, nor any permanent home is also well described through the plight of the Bidoon.

[Claire Binkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first, I tread through this book extremely cautiously, as I remembered that historical "don't tread on me" type saying, but later on, I found Abrahamian's style incredibly harmless, positive and constructive for this brave new world that we are building together!

About halfway through I remembered to check the back for the endnotes. She does not note where each comment is inserted where it is meant, but I am OK with that, as what she had to say intrigued me.

It encouraged me to check out the paper Al Jazeera a little bit more often. Beforehand I thought maybe I shouldn't since I was honestly just willing to hide in my closet with my cats since the world is a terrifying place. But seriously, my International Relations professor discussed Al Jazeera right alongside the New York Times. Why not.

[Sahand Yazdanyar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual Rating 8.25/10

I liked this book -- easy read, interesting topic, and lots of interconnecting stories. Two things kept me from *really* getting into it (one of which was mu "fault". First, it felt like every story (and the story overall) was missing the final piece of the puzzle. I'm not sure how to really explain it, but it wasn't necessarily a cliffhanger, more of a "there still needs to be more here to complete this." Second, I wish I read this when it first came out, but also it would be great to have a follow-up to this (it has been a decade after all).

Anyway, good read and still has relevancy.

[Tara Norton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this book- it provides some ideas and stories about citizenship in a modern world. The book offers ideas for thought, and is refreshing in that way. She doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but presents her observations and reports stories that show how the concept of citizenship is changing, how unscrupulous actors are profiting from it, and how it is the less well-off who are losing out.

[Ruxi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was enthralling. I could have read it in one sitting. The author maintained a humorous tone while dealing with heavy questions such as "What is the point of citizenship?" and "Who has the right to decide citizenship?" None of the things dealt with in the book can be reduced to black and white, but the author presented both sides of the issues- she wasn't biased.

[Maisarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A real exposé of citizenship in a capitalist world ft. real interesting characters you can hardly believe exist.

First introduced to this when I was doing my undergrad thesis on statelessness in Malaysia and my then supervisor told the story of how Kuwait bought Comoros citizenship for the stateless bidoon. Obviously came as a shock to me. Good read. Great storytelling.

[Michele Benson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comoros. Comoros is a small, impoverished island off the coast of Madagascar. In 2008 they began selling citizenship to the Kuwaitis for their “stateless” people. This allows the Kuwaiti government to deport unwanted people and rich Kuwaitis to use the passports for dual citizenship and avoid taxation. Who knew this was a thing?

[Elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up after reading The Hidden Globe earlier this year. Abrahamian analyses the hierarchy of citizenship from the uber wealthy to the powerless stateless. She spends most of the book addressing the Bidoon population and the Comoros Island passport scheme. I’m curious to see what Abrahamian’s next book will cover.

[Maureen Milton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the functions of borders, citizenship, nationalism and commerce. Some passports are more equal than others. It might appear brief & dry, but it is saturated with meaning, especially at the moment.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Comoro Islands story reads like something that Jimmy Breslin would have uncovered years ago - behavior that's equal parts cynical, believable, and telling.

[Isa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Clumsily written; the author was far too indecisive about the tone and characterization.

[Arturo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Je trouve assez intéressant ce sujet et je crois que cette livre est un ouverture au domaine du vente du Passport et importance du global citizenship

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The core story of the stateless Bidoon, and others who been forced into statelessness, have chosen to be stateless or chosen to attach themselves to a number of nations, is interesting, but I was more drawn to the broader conversation about how the notion of citizenship has changed and will continue to change.

[Majid Ghyasi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brief look at another underprivileged group, the bidoons, or those without a country. Pretty enlightening and an informative read. highly recommended.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tale as old as time, and yet it's happening now. This book really rocked this momma.

[Lu]

*** dicen “an excellent study of the selling and buying of citizenship.”

[laila* · Rating 3 out of 5]

super interesting—i wish she’d focused more on the bidoon though. the bitcoin part made me loss interest…