Atossa Araxia Abrahamian To Give Tour of 'The Hidden Globe'

The journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian writes about the lines drawn on the global map by the nation-state system—and the tools that the wealthy and powerful use to exploit cracks in those lines, evading accountability and reshaping the world as they see fit.

On January 30, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights will host Abrahamian at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore for a talk about her new book, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, which investigates the proliferation worldwide of extraterritorial “zones” that exist outside of any country’s standard laws. (Hundreds of such zones exist in the United States alone.) (Register for the talk.)

These zones are increasingly central to any accurate understanding of the global economy, world trade, and the geopolitics of the future. They are also of special interest to the human rights community because of questions they raise about jursidiction and enforcement. Much of international human rights law presumes a context of a world delineated into sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens’ rights. What happens when that context no longer applies?

The Hidden Globe moves across history—beginning as early as thirteenth-century Switzerland—and around the world, as Abrahamian explores, via research and in-person reporting, the new landscape of free trade zones, tax havens, free ports, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, and cities controlled entirely by corporations. It was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and the New York Times, and was the subject of a lengthy rave in The New Yorker, which called the book a “vivid, revelatory, and politically unpredictable tour” of a world where the benefits of national sovereignty are parcelled out and sold off to the highest bidders. 

Abrahamian’s first book, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen, explored similar territory, investigating the multi-billion market for passports and asking what the sale of citizenship meant for nomadic billionaires, the stateless poor, and everybody else. Her journalism has been published by the New York Times, The Guardian, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, New York magazine, The Atlantic, and The Nation, where she has worked as an editor. (See a selection of her articles.)

This event is the first installment of The Stories of Rights, a Pozen Center series that will focus on the interplay between human rights and storytelling. Guest speakers will include human rights practitioners who use storytelling as a tool in human rights interventions; writers and artists who tell stories about human rights mechanisms and institutions; and journalists—like Abrahamian—who produce well-researched stories of timely interest to the human rights community.

The Stories of Rights public events will often be complimented by more intimate gatherings where students can talk with guests about their working lives and career paths. While at UChicago, Abrahamian will meet with students from human rights and other select majors interested in learning about the working life of a magazine writer and book author.

Abrahamian’s Seminary Co-op talk will take place on January 30th at 4 p.m.. She will be in conversation with Pozen Center Communication Specialist Peter Baker, also a journalist and writer on human rights issues. Register now.