The past thirty years have seen a rapid rise around the world in legislation that enables people to acquire citizenship or residence rights in exchange for a donation or an investment. Prof. Kochenov will introduce the phenomenon of investment migration and position it vis-à-vis the key trends in the literature on this emerging field. In the process he demonstrates that investment migration frequently has nothing to do with immigration or change of residence; that the phenomenon is rooted in the global rights and duties assignment today, where blood-based passport apartheid is the main principle behind the inequitable self-preservation of the global aristocracy of ‘super citizens’, as well as the nature of the notion of national sovereignty coupled with the nationalist streetlight effect of the huge share of the commentaries, inter alia. The presentation will draw on two recent volumes Prof. Kochenov co-edited: Citizenship and Residence Sales  (Cambridge, 2023, with Kristin Surak, London School of Economics) and Investment Migration in Europe and the World (Bloomsbury 2025, with Madeleine Sumption MBE, Oxford University and Martijn van den Brink, Leiden). The introductions of both books are available on SSRN, with the Cambridge book’s introduction available here and the Bloomsbury book’s introduction available here.

About the Speaker:

Prof. Kochenov leads Rule of Law research at CEU Democracy Institute (Budapest) and teaches at CEU Department of Legal Studies (Vienna) and LUISS Guido Carli (Rome). His core interests are global comparative citizenship and principles of EU constitutionalism. His most recent monograph Citizenship (MIT 2019) has been translated into several languages and reviewed in NYRB. Among the numerous edited volumes he published or about to release are 5 books with Cambridge and 2 with Oxford University Press, as well as 3 Bloomsbury collections. Prof. Kochenov lectured at Princeton, Oxford, UNAM and Osaka Graduate School of Law and the College of Europe, inter many alia and was a Fellow at NYU, Chicago, Bad Homburg and Basel Institute of Global and European Affaires. Dimitry Vladimirovich consults governments and international organizations. And was involved in the constitutional restructuring of the Netherlands Antilles and the introduction of the Maltese citizenship by investment. He has served of as the founding chairman of the Investment Migration Council (Geneva).