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Paper short abstract:

This paper conceptualises offshore citizenship as a form of "market citizenship", contingent on crisis. This re-definition of citizenship lays bare the inherent class and race bias of a global regime of mobility, while offering an opportunity to re-define citizenship as a democratic project.

Paper long abstract:

"Citizenship-by-investment" has become a fixture of many southern European countries, leading to the proliferation of an "offshore citizenship". This paper conceptualises this development as part of a process of "accumulation through dispossession" (Harvey 2003) of the social realm, a neoliberal phenomenon accelerating since the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008. Offshore citizenship enabling mobility is thus viewed as co-constitutive of regimes of austerity generative of immobilised subjectivities - both legal citizens and non-citizens - enduring conditions of existential "stuckedness" (Hage 2009). Building on this premise, the concept is seen in conjunction with the gradual entrenchment of a "consumer" (2008) or "market citizenship" (Streeck 2012), whereby the original idea of (legal) citizenship facilitating access to democratic and social rights is substituted by equal access to market consumption, in this case, commodified mobility.

Viewed from this perspective, offshore citizenship does not constitute an aberration, but rather an attempt at institutionalising the global phenomenon of "expats" (Kunz 2016), conceived as primarily skilled and white, and possessing "the class consciousness of frequent travellers" (Calhoun 2008). Legal citizenship in the broader sense (including statuses such as "refugee" or "subsidiary protection") is being transformed as an instrument policing a global "regime of mobility" (Glick-Schiller and Salazar 2013; Rygiel 2010), where race functions as a prime organising principle. Based on evidence and ethnographic snapshots from Cyprus, this paper argues that "offshore citizenship" as market citizenship offers an opportunity of re-signifying the concept of citizenship as an inclusive "institution in flux" (Isin 2009) based on solidarity.