Bringing Citizenship to Market: How to Sell a Quasi-Sacred Status

• In Event: 091 - Regular Session. Citizenship: Shifting Grounds of Entitlement

Abstract

What explains the rapid rise of citizenship by investment programs and what are the implications for citizenship more broadly? Moving beyond the largely theoretical economic and normative scholarship on the sale of citizenship, this article draws on two years of fieldwork to explain how citizenship has become marketized. The analysis situates citizenship by investment programs within a broader field encompassing immigrant investor visas and discretionary economic citizenship. It shows how this field conditioned the development and spread of formal programs, and the role of industry actors, geopolitical inequalities, and extra-territorial rights in this transformation. Service providers retooled murky discretionary channels in the Global South into formal citizenship by investment schemes, which could be offered as residence planning tools alongside the investor visas available in core countries. A drive for legitimation has kept pace with the rise of the industry because the product’s value is contingent upon the privileges it secures in third countries, which hold significant power over the programs. The paper concludes by discussing two implications for our understanding of citizenship more broadly: the role of strategic action in making choices about a quasi-sacred status, and the role of third-party actors in both bringing citizenship to market and legitimating its commodification.

Author

• Kristin Surak, SOAS, University of London