Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, National Fellow, 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.
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. She is working on a book for Riverhead that 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 criss-crossing 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 lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.
Selected Work
- The Dream of Open Borders Is Real—in the High Arctic: A cover story for the Nation about Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago with the world’s most open borders.
- How a Tax Haven Is Leading the Race to Privatize Space: A Guardian feature about how Luxembourg is rewriting the laws of outer space.
- Who Loses When a Country Puts Citizenship Up for Sale?: A New York Times opinion piece revealing the UAE’s plan to document its stateless people with Comoro Island passports.
- There Is No Good Reason You Should Have to Be a Citizen to Vote: A New York Times opinion piece in favor of non-citizen voting.