Theodoros Rakopoulos
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Conclusion
Propertied citizenship
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This short chapter delivers the book’s main thrust, already developed in the previous chapter: global citizens exist because of two types of macro-sociological inequities that inform and animate the whole industry. The book’s main contribution is an ethnographic exploration of the dialectics between two types of inequality. Firstly, an established inequity exists among passports in the world. The valuating private institutions like Henley measure a passport’s worth in relation to each other. We thus have the global birthright lottery: citizenship is inherently unequal, as it situates a person in an intentionally stratified environment, where being Austrian is “worth” more than being Ghanaian. Secondly, an established inequity exists among citizens of any nation-state. In some cases this can mean that the internal apartheid welfare-related regime, attached as it is to the rights-bearing institution of citizenship. In most cases this simply means that the elites can partake in the global sharing of the pie using some of their fortune to overcome the asset they lag behind from their co-elite partners elsewhere – a “good” citizenship. Finally, the chapter and the book also contribute the idea that to further understand citizenship we need to have a deeper ethnographic account of property. Citizenship is historically an institution for the propertied lot, and the citizenship by investment industry renders this local fact a global reality. Investigating the relations between property and statehood in the ethnographic pragmatics of a post-colonial state, in this book and elsewhere, has been my main contribution.

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