On October 8, 2008, a group of government officials from the Comoro Islands made their way from their villages to a small airport not far from the nation’s capital, where, on a runway overlooking the Indian Ocean, a private plane stood waiting to fly them to Kuwait.

The reason for the officials’ trip to Kuwait was economic: their country was completely broke, and had been that way for as long as they could remember. Earlier that year, the Comorian government had received a proposal from some visiting Arab businessmen. What if the Comoros started to sell their citizenship to raise funds? There was a great demand for passports in the Middle East, the men explained; for starters, wealthy individuals saw a second or third nationality as a shortcut to make travelling and doing business abroad easier. Some Gulf countries were also figuring out what to do with large groups of Bidoon, or stateless people residing within their borders.