Why are citizens of some countries so much richer, on average, than citizens of other countries? This project explores the very concept of citizenship as one of the key explanations for why the world is such an unequal place. At the same time as new methods of extraction and productivity have generated vast wealth over the last two centuries, new systems of governance have hoarded this wealth through limits on political rights and economic claims. Discrimination against non-citizens has reshaped inequality on a global scale -- from a world in which most inequality was within countries to a world in which most inequality is between countries.
Charles Kurzman is a professor of sociology and co-director of the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of The Missing Martyrs (first edition, 2011; second edition, 2019), Democracy Denied, 1905-1915 (2008), and The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (2004), and editor of the anthologies Liberal Islam (1998) and Modernist Islam, 1840-1940 (2002).
