Join us for a book talk with author Atossa Araxia Abrahamian and The New School's Quentin Bruneau and Victoria Hattam!
A globe shows the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and corporations.
Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity: bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters.
Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space. By mapping this countergeography, which decides who wins and who loses in the new global order—and helping us to see how it might be otherwise—The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.
Presented by Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School for Social Research and The New School.
Mira Siegelberg is Associate Professor of Politics and Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School for Social Research. She is a historian with interests in European and U.S. intellectual history, the history and theory of rights, law and legal thought, and the politics of citizenship and migration.
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is an independent journalist who writes about the cracks in the nation-state system.
A former editor at the Nation and Al Jazeera America, Abrahamian’s reporting and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Intercept, and many other publications.
Quentin Bruneau is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College.
His research focuses on two broad areas. The first is international political economy, and particularly the historical development of international finance from the nineteenth century to the present day.Â
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