Atossa Araxia Abrahamian - "The Hidden Globe" - Peter Baker
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian will discuss her new book The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. She will be joined in conversation by Peter Baker. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion.
At the Seminary Co-op
In partnership with the Pozen Center
About the book: 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.
About the author: 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 has written for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Intercept, and many other publications. Abrahamian’s first book, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (Columbia Global Reports, 2015) investigated the multi-billion dollar market for passports, interrogating what the sale of citizenship means for nomadic billionaires, the stateless poor, and everybody else.
The Hidden Globe, which will be published by Riverhead in 2024, examines the jurisdictions above, between, and beneath nations. Combining reporting, criticism, metaphysics and legal theory, it leads readers through the special economic zones that prop up world trade, the polar archipelagos that challenge the definition of national sovereignty, the ships crisscrossing the world flying flags of convenience, and the micro-states rewriting the laws of outer space.
A Livingston Award finalist in 2019, Abrahamian was a recipient of the 2021 Silvers Award for Works in Progress and the 2022 Whiting Nonfiction Grant. She spent the 2022–2023 academic year as a Knight Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan and is a 2024 New America National fellow. Abrahamian is a Swiss, Iranian, Canadian and American citizen. She was raised in Geneva, Switzerland and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.
About the Interlocutor: Peter Baker is the Communications Specialist for the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. He helps the Center tell its evolving story to multiple audiences, from students to experts, in Hyde Park and beyond.
His journalism, essays, and reviews, which often touch on human rights issues, have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and other magazines. In 2018, he embedded in a Chicago public high school history class for a month to write about students grappling with the local legacy of police torture. His first novel, Planes (Knopf, 2022), deals with daily life in the shadow of post-9/11 extraordinary rendition.
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