Passports, Prosperity and Problems: (Counter)geopolitical Narratives of Vanuatu’s Citizenship by Investment Scheme

Citizenship by Investment (CBI) schemes – programs facilitating foreign nationals to purchase citizenship – can help governments of the Global South raise essential revenue. They can also exacerbate and facilitate corruption and undermine security, which has led to some Western governments taking action against countries that operate CBI schemes. To date, there has been scant research on the discursive contexts that shape geopolitical narratives framing Western understandings of, and responses to, CBI schemes in the Global South. In this article, we examine representations of Vanuatu’s CBI scheme through a critical discourse analysis of media reporting in Australia and New Zealand. We find that media mostly reproduce what we label the ‘security-governance nexus’ which stresses concerns about the scheme’s negative impact on security, foreign interference, and governance, to the detriment of counter-geopolitical narratives that highlight the importance of the Vanuatu’s CBI scheme for its independent economic development. In turn, we show that media play a critical, though overlooked, role in reproducing a geopolitical imagination that reflects donor priorities and interests, at the expense of efforts within the Global South to forge independent pathways to economic development.