Episode
EU Citizenship - Dimitry Kochenov | 2025 Episode 28
- Podcast
- The IR thinker
- Published
- Nov 24, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 4291
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.irthinker.com/eu-citizenship-dimitry-kochenov
- Audio
- https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/655776911a7d7e0012cbc914/e/6924cb39ac4db2b031d334f9/media.mp3
Actions
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Summary
This episode of The IR thinker features a wide-ranging conversation with Professor Dimitry Kochenov on what it really means to “belong” in a world where citizenship is conditional, unequal, and sometimes absent altogether. We unpack the paradox of citizenship as both a legal fiction and a lived necessity, probing whether institutions truly “grant” citizenship, what it means to live as stateless, and whether “real” EU citizenship exists beyond the rhetoric. The discussion traces how EU citizenship can simultaneously empower individuals, through mobility, rights, and protection, while also hollowing out democratic accountability in member states. We examine “market citizenship” and the monetisation of legal status, asking whether citizenship-by-investment schemes that effectively sell access to the EU should be abolished, and close with a critical look at multiple citizenship: is it an emerging path towards global justice or simply an additional layer of privilege for the already mobile? Dimitry Kochenov Professor Dimitry Kochenov is a leading scholar of global citizenship and constitutionalism, with a particular focus on the rule of law, EU federalism, and external relations law. He heads the Rule of Law research group at the Democracy Institute of Central European University in Budapest and teaches Global Citizenship at CEU’s Department of Legal Studies in Vienna. Through his work on statelessness, EU citizenship, and the political economy of “citizenship for sale”, he has become a key voice in contemporary debates on how legal status shapes human dignity, mobility, and the evolving architecture of international order. Publications: EU enlargement and the failure of conditionality: pre-accession conditionality in the fields of democracy and the rule o…