Sociolinguistic investigations of nation-state citizenship increasingly attend to the concept less as a preconceived or fixed political category (aligned neatly with sovereign borders) than as a discursive accomplishment: a product of iterative negotiation and mediation. This entails analysis of what regimes and performances of citizenship do – what they express and achieve – and the critical interpretation of these outcomes in relation to matters of inequality, global mobility, and the conditions of late capitalism.

Building on this theoretical foundation, this paper focuses on a highly salient way that citizenship manifests in everyday life, which is nevertheless relatively underexamined in sociolinguistic research: the passport. Acknowledging manifold ways passports serve as metonyms for citizenship, while embracing their semiotic complexity, I orient to them (at once) as: material texts, and a textual genre in themselves; representations of individual social, and geopolitical identity; and central media for contemporary ‘nation-branding’. Passports are 'thingified' texts, rendered freshly commodifiable: alchemical entanglements of economic and symbolic value. This is true not just for a bearer, or the state they belong to (whose brand is upheld) but other stakeholders invested in the commensurability of one passport with another – in evaluating how designs, affordances, and values compare.

Passports nowadays encompass not just identity, nor geographic division/bordering, nor capital, but their concatenation across wide-ranging text trajectories, within explicit citizenship industries – a ‘sovereign prerogative’ gone to market (Surak 2021). In this paper I use multimodal critical discourse-analytic methods to apprehend passports' global metadiscursive production, providing a programmatic account over three overlapping scales: nation-branding schema, states’ announcement of new passport designs, and heavily-securitised manufacturing processes. In critically investigating the theoretical/applied implications of these unique products, I invite further reflection on how the underexplored political/semiotic labour they entail intersects with their ephemeral/symbolic qualities, as well as the drastic inequalities they enforce.