Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is an independent journalist who writes about the cracks in the nation-state system. An editor for Now, Voyager magazine, she has worked as an editor at The Nation and Reuters and writes for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications.
Her first book, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen, investigated the multibillion-dollar market for passports and examined what the sale of citizenship means for nomadic billionaires, the stateless poor, and others.
The Hidden Globe, published in 2024, examines jurisdictions above, between, and beneath nations. Combining reporting, criticism, metaphysics, and legal theory, it explores special economic zones that support global trade, polar archipelagos that challenge definitions of sovereignty, ships crossing the world under flags of convenience, and microstates rewriting the laws of outer space. The book was named one of The Washington Post and CBS News’ five best nonfiction books of 2024 and was a New York Times Notable Book.
Abrahamian received 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 was a 2024 New America National Fellow.
She is a Swiss, Iranian, Canadian, and American citizen. She was raised in Geneva, Switzerland, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.