Project description
Global inequality as a result of citizenship commodification
Citizenship by investment (CBI) systems that legally grant individuals second citizenship in exchange for an investment made in the host country have proliferated in the EU. The result has been the commodification of citizenship and a rising citizenship industry. However, the new system is having a serious impact on citizenship, migration and social inequality. Nevertheless, the CBI phenomenon has attracted insufficient scientific attention and the rising of the citizenship industry remains unexplored. The EU-funded CitIndus project will investigate new ways the global citizenship market emerged and examine its role in the proliferation of CBI, in the formation of new migration systems and in the creation of corporate political power. Understanding the citizenship industry will reveal the role of commodification in increasing inequality.
Objective
Originally introduced by the Caribbean microstate St. Kitts and Nevis in 1984, the possibility of buying citizenship via citizenship-by-investment (CBI) schemes has more recently spread across the Caribbean and to Europe. This proliferation of CBI, the associated commodification of citizenship and migration, the increase in corporate political power and reworking of social inequality are of fundamental importance to Europe and global society. Yet, CBI has received scant scholarly attention and particularly the ‘Citizenship Industry’ – the corporations and industry bodies driving and profiting from CBI – remains largely unexamined. ‘CitIndus’ addresses these gaps. It will explore how corporations effectively created, skilfully perform and arguably control the global citizenship market; illuminate their role in the proliferation of CBI, in shaping global migration regimes and as increasingly influential intermediaries between governments and citizens. Examining the Citizenship Industry will also further our understandings of how citizenship mediates global and local social inequalities and how its commodification reworks these structures of inequality. CitIndus thus advances interdisciplinary social science on citizenship, migration and social inequality. It also meets growing calls to embed migration research more effectively within social theory and advances the conversation between cutting-edge postcolonial and political economy approaches. Methodologically, CitIndus takes the innovative approach of 'following’ the Citizenship Industry, synthesising complementary qualitative methods, including document analysis, interviews, participant observation and qualitative GIS. CitIndus will be supervised by two world-leading experts: Prof Torpey, an authority on citizenship and the state at CUNY, and Prof Jazeel, an authority on postcolonial geography and migration at UCL and its Migration Research Unit, a European hub for migration research.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
WC1E 6BT London
United Kingdom