The book, edited by Dimitry Kochenov, lead researcher of our Rule of Law Workgroup, and Kristin Surak (LSE), and published by Cambridge University Press, takes an interdisciplinary approach to unpacking investment migration.
Citizenship and residence by investment is a fast-growing global phenomenon. As of 2022, more than a third of all countries in the world offered paths to membership in exchange for a donation or investment into their economies. Yet we know little about how these programs operate and debates in academia and the wider public are often misinformed by sensationalist cases.
This book offers a multidisciplinary exploration of both citizenship and residence by investment on a global scale. Bringing together the expertise of leading legal scholars, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians, it provides an informative and empirically grounded assessment of the origins, operation, key causes, and the legal bases of the investment migration programs. By so doing, the volume demystifies citizenship and residence by investment and takes a critical postcolonial global perspective, addressing key issues in belonging, exclusion, and inequality that define the world today. It also offers an in-depth assessment of investment migration informed by empirical work from a wide arrange of perspectives and disciplines, and takes a dynamic, global approach to investment migration looking at citizenship by investment and residence by investment as global phenomena informed by history and jurisdictional differences.
Chapter 2 - Victims of Citizenship is authored by Dimitry Kochenov. It introduces the concept of ‘victims of citizenship’, encompassing the majority of the world’s population for whom citizenship is a set of liabilities and obstacles rather than a bundle of rights, who are caged in spaces of no opportunity by border-crossing and visa rules designed to keep them out of the ‘First World’, and who thus find themselves on the ‘other side’ of the concept of citizenship, behind its Western façade of equality, political self-determination and rights.
Chapter 20 - Investment Migration and Subnational Jurisdictions is authored by Godfrey Baldacchino and our OSUN Post-doctoral Fellow Elena Basheska. It contextualizes the very starting premise of the majority of scholarly approaches to investment migration: the sovereignty of the state.
Learn more about the book here.