Over the past decade, investor citizenship has transformed itself from a decidedly niche enterprise advertised in the back pages of the business press into a star-studded, gala-filled affair. To buy a passport, you used to need to know a guy who knew a guy in Nevis; now, a bevy of management consultants can assist you in your journey to become a ‘global citizen’ and offer tax and estate planning services as add-ons to boot. The passport business has become just that: a business. It has been sanitized, professionalized, and systematized into an industry that seeks to legitimize itself at every turn. Trade groups compete with each other to set industry standards (and stave off actual regulation). Countries compete with each other to attract citizens. Individual brokerages go to enormous lengths to lure clients who, in turn, have likewise gone from ultra-high net worth to merely very wealthy. Thanks to a combination of downward pressure on prices and acts of God, like Covid-19 and unprecedented hurricanes, that push countries to be more creative about raising funds and bringing in foreign investment. The result is that buying citizenship has never been easier – or more controversial.

Because with this boom came scrutiny. Investor citizenship has been a thorn in the European Union’s side since Malta decided to put its passports up for sale in 2014; scandals in Cyprus and Montenegro followed, along with a series of hearings, investigations, and denunciations. So far, Brussels has not been able to convince its member states to stop putting a price tag on belonging, but it is unlikely to stop trying. Each time a new country raises the possibility of doing so, an opposition politician will protest on the grounds that sovereignty should not be bought and sold.

And yet: what could be a more brazen show of national independence than to decide exactly who becomes a citizen, and how? The paradoxes of citizenship by investment reflect the greater contradictions still of our globalized nation-state system. What to make of this strange world where citizens are not born or made but bought outright, sometimes without even visiting their new home? How to wrap our minds around the complicity of nation-states in this market which, on the surface, appears to weaken the very premise on which their legitimacy rests? This volume is an attempt to find the answers, with contributions from scholars of sociology, political science, and law and international relations. More importantly, these authors are not afraid to raise more questions still: because if the past ten years have showed us anything, it is that the institution of citizenship is nowhere near done with its transformations.