The ‘citizenship industry’: commodified citizenship, the corporate sector and global inequality
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.