The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen

From the intro: "The “global citizens” who buy papers from Caribbean tax havens without setting foot in their adopted countries, and the disenfranchised residents of the Emirates who obtain Comorian citizenship with no plans to ever go there, represent two sides of a common phenomenon. They challenge any meaningful connection between man and state. Global citizenship is itself a new form of statelessness. This book is a product of this sense of statelessness, of being somehow “of” the world without belonging anywhere within it. What does citizenship become when it becomes detached from any kind of civic engagement and political identification — when it is a matter of convenience, not community? What are the stakes when members of a community no longer feel a particular kinship or loyalty to any particular place? What does it mean when the wealthy can move freely between countries and exploit the “borderless” world that globalization has promised, but that the poor who try to cross borders can’t — or, if they can, routinely die trying? Who among us gets to be “global”? I think the stories in this book begin to give an answer."