Books
Dr. Kristin Surak is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of the award-winning book, The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires (Harvard University Press 2023).
Browse the full collection below and find your next great read!
The Golden Passport
The first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship, examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them, and the normalization of a once shadowy practice.
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Reviews
“Precise and persuasive”- Ferdinand Mount, Times Literary Supplement (1/26/2024)
“Required reading for policymakers working with small countries. But it is also a fascinating study of how people--and their capital--seek to move around a world that is at once hugely interconnected and riven by inequities...The Golden Passport is a definitive, detailed, and unusually nuanced account of the industry.” - Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Foreign Affairs (12/12/2023)
“Forceful, original, and packed with empirical detail, this is a major contribution to our understanding of the current global order. Kristin Surak makes clear the wider social, economic, and geopolitical implications of a Faustian bargain in place between the super-rich and some of the poorer countries of the world. Her pathbreaking book deserves to reach a wide readership.” - Anthony Giddens, author of Turbulent and Mighty Continent
“A tour de force, offering at once a history of 'citizenship by investment, ' a business school case study in market-making, and a peek into the lives of the super-wealthy. Surak's book is a sharp-eyed contribution and a major milestone.” - John Torpey, author of The Invention of the Passport
Making Tea,
Making Japan
The tea ceremony persists as one of the most evocative symbols of Japan. Originally a pastime of elite warriors in premodern society, it was later recast as an emblem of the modern Japanese state, only to be transformed again into its current incarnation, largely the hobby of middle-class housewives. How does the cultural practice of a few come to represent a nation as a whole?
Taking readers on a rare journey into the elusive world of tea ceremony, Surak offers an insightful account of the fundamental processes of modernity—the work of making nations.
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日本らしさと茶道
アメリカから来た女性社会学者が、10年の歳月をかけ、日本で体験した茶道の世界を描き、茶道と国民国家との関わりについて考察する。はたして茶道とは？ 真の日本らしさとは？ 世界に広がる茶道とその背景にあるビジネスモデルとは？― 国際化の中で我々日本人は、茶道を守り伝えるために何をすべきか。
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Reviews
"Surak's Making Tea, Making Japan is one of the most astute studies of the ceremony to appear in decades. Beyond tea aficionados, Surak's book should be read by scholars and students of culture and nationalism because Surak's main contribution is showing how these two fields of embodied culture and nationalism are so deeply intermeshed in the practice of tea." - Eric C. Rath, Journal of Japanese Studies
"Kristin Surak's elegantly written analysis of the tea ceremony is an excellent addition to the literature on cultural nationalism . . . [T]his book is a meticulous study of tea. Surak resists the temptation of falling into clichés and offers a vibrant analysis of the practice through historical reconstruction, institutional analysis, ethnographic inquiry, and phenomenological description . . . Surak's study is theoretically innovative and essential for sociologists and anthropologists." - Stephanie Assmann, Social History
"Kristin Surak's richly contextualized study shows in vivid detail how and why tea came to be, and remains, such a strong carrier of nation in Japan, at once performance and product. Sociologists in particular will not want to miss the fine ethnographic investigation of the tea ceremony in contemporary Japan." - Priscilla Ferguson, Columbia University
Citizenship and Residence Sales:
Rethinking the Boundaries of Belonging
Citizenship and residence by investment is a fast-growing global phenomenon. As of 2022, more than a third of all countries in the world offered paths to membership in exchange for a donation or investment into their economies. Yet we know little about how these programmes operate and debates in academia and the wider public are often misinformed by sensationalist cases. This book offers a multidisciplinary exploration of both citizenship and residence by investment on a global scale. Bringing together the expertise of leading legal scholars, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians, it provides an informative and empirically grounded assessment of the origins, operation, key causes, and the legal bases of the investment migration programmes. By so doing, the volume demystifies citizenship and residence by investment and takes a critical postcolonial global perspective, addressing key issues in belonging, exclusion, and inequality that define the world today.
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Reviews
“Passports by investment may be the ultimate political turn of globalization. Such programs recognize the demand for alternative citizenship or residence and supply these to the elite of the world. This deeply researched and well-written volume provides all the analytical tools and empirics for scholars and policymakers to study these arrangements and contemplate the longer term implications.” Miguel A. Centeno, Princeton University
”Rigorous and sparklingly innovative interdisciplinary volume on emergent global commodification of citizenship status, offering a robust set of stringent empirical and historical analyses, framed by a resolutely non-romanticist conceptual approach to citizenship as status and practice, this collection lays indispensable groundwork for a new generation of 'citizenship studies'. Essential reading for the field going forward.” Linda Bosniak, Rutgers Law School
”The prospect of 'selling citizenship' provokes indignation from those who cling to a romantic idea of what citizenship should mean, be or do. The authors of this volume proceed from the reality of what citizenship as legal status actually is and does, and raise important questions about the normative and pragmatic implications for regulating how citizenship is distributed.” Audrey Macklin, University of Toronto