Passport Island

This book offers a unique insight into the global trend towards the commodification of citizenship. In Cyprus, as well as many other countries, foreign investors can become naturalised citizens for a price.

Exploring the fact that there is now a price tag to the national (and therefore EU) passport, the book examines the nature of citizenship alongside the unequal interactions between global political economy and national political communities. The analysis stresses how golden passports rearrange common sensibilities about the principle of political equality through citizenship. The book is a rare ethnography of the transactional relations between Russian investors who wish to acquire the Cypriot passport and their Cypriot 'facilitators', the local professionals who ease the process. The book argues that golden passports are the continuation of offshoring by other means, as now not only capital but capitalists too, 'have no country'.