Audiobooks by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

'In describing insidiously interconnected global regimes of inequality and injustice, Atossa Abrahamian boldly renews our sense of reality and brilliantly illuminates our political impasse.' - Pankaj Mishra, author of The Age of Anger Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist's riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. The map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens' rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside its neatly delineated borders, however, a parallel universe has been engineered into existence, consisting of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of the hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed the commodity they had-bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Following its evolution around the world, she reveals how prize-winning economists, eccentric theorists, visionary statesmen, and consultants masterminded its export in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers where immigrants languish in limbo, and charter cities controlled by by foreign governments and multinational foreign corporations-and even into outer space, where tiny Luxembourg aspires to mining rights on asteroids. By mapping the hidden geography that decides who wins and who loses in this new global order-and how it might be otherwise-The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (Author), Patrick Harrison, TBD (Narrator)

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The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen

The buying and selling of citizenship has become a legitimate, thriving business in just a few years. Entrepreneurs are renouncing America and Europe in favor of tax havens in the Caribbean with the help of a cottage industry of lawyers, bankers, and consultants that specialize in expatriation. But as journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian discovered, the story of twenty-first century citizenship is bigger than millionaires buying their second or third passport. When she learned that mysterious middlemen had persuaded the Comoro Islands to turn to selling citizenship as a new source of revenue, she decided to follow the money trail to the Middle East. There, she found that officials in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates had bulk-ordered passports for their bidoon, or stateless population, transforming these men, women, and children without countries into Comorian citizens practically overnight. In her timely and eye-opening first book, Abrahamian travels the globe to meet these willing and unwitting 'cosmopolites,' or citizens of the world, who show us how transactional and unpredictable national citizenship in the twenty-first century can be.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (Author), Bernadette Dunne (Narrator)

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