Paper short abstract:

Through fieldwork on the golden passports industry, I suggest that buying citizenship is the continuation of offshoring by other means. The paper associates citizenship with property both conceptually and ethnographically, to scrutinize a trend reshaping the world of capital today.

Paper long abstract:

This paper suggests that the naturalisation of foreign investors, a scheme known as "global citizenship", is a salient formation of contemporary offshoring. I argue that offshored capital has a local face and a national passport, apart from a global "logic". Like any offshoring process, "global citizenship" is removed from two tiers of empirical realities: the first relates to the country through in which it is established, in this case Cyprus; the second concerns the historical empirics of citizenship. Based on fieldwork with the gate-keeping middlepersons who facilitate golden passports in Cyprus, the paper fills these two empirical gaps, suggesting the conceptual complexity of citizenship by investment programmes, as they interlock domestic and global practices.

Cyprus, an erstwhile long-standing offshore centre, and a country suffering a 45-year division, is locked in a nexus of difficult citizenship politics, which this scheme complicates even further. The paper analyses the domestic complications of a global Republic, seeing its global citizenship dream as the continuation of offshoring by other means. Furthermore, the paper argues that golden passports offer a vantage point to reestablish citizenship, both conceptually and politically, as a phenomenon based on property and elite mobility. The ethics of buying and offshoring citizenship are rooted in the international politics of class, as well as in a long tradition of the citizenry as an ensemble of property-owners.