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.