I. Introduction

COVID-19 has been a moment of fast and progressive re-bordering of the world: border controls at national frontiers were reintroduced in many countries as well as in urban contexts, and travel became suddenly distinguished between “essential” and “non-essential”. The movement of people has, however, never been fully stopped: rather, the pandemic has strengthened class-based mobility and, thus, unequal access to it. As Alison Bashford has demonstrated, pandemics and infectious diseases have historically been moments in which new racialised borders have been enforced.^{Footnote 1} In fact, a “new spatial organisation of infectious disease control” had historically emerged as a response to pandemics and epidemics.^{Footnote 2} The work of Kathryn Olivarius has similarly reconstructed how, during the yellow fever epidemic, immunity was “wielded as a weapon” in New Orleans and was used to multiply racial hierarchies among citizens as well as between slaves and citizens.^{Footnote 3} Today, state responses to COVID-19 as a “global health threat” are restructuring urban, social and national frontiers, further intertwined (and exacerbated by) the deep geopolitical inequalities of vaccine distribution. At the same time, the multiplication of borders and restrictions to freedom of movement has been justified in the name of citizens’ “common good”.

European Union (EU) Member States temporarily closed their national frontiers from April 2020 until mid-June 2020 – even though, as Elspeth Guild has pointed out, this happened without centralised coordination.^{Footnote 4} In fact, in spring 2020, about 91% of the world’s population was living in a country where new border restrictions had been enforced in response to the pandemic.^{Footnote 5} Since then, border closures across the world have proliferated and have been reactivated according to an on-and-off rhythm. In February 2021, the UK introduced new border restrictions, mandatory tests upon arrival (whose costs were to be borne by the traveller) and hotel quarantine for travellers coming from countries that had been put on a “red list”, following the Australian model. One month later, a travel ban was enforced to hamper people from travelling abroad “without a reasonable excuse”. In this respect, it is worth noting that one of the “reasonable excuses” to leave the UK was the carrying out of “activities related to buying, selling, letting or renting a residential property”.^{Footnote 6} Such selective measures are just one illustration of the points made above: rather than stopping circulation, the COVID-19 border restrictions have simply strengthened class-based mobility.^{Footnote 7} In fact, those citizens who are able to spend money to divert their route in order to bypass some national restrictions, to bring evidence of being businesspeople or to spend two weeks in hotel quarantine can travel in a relatively smooth way.

Another striking feature of the multiplication of border restrictions across the globe has been their general popular acceptance with few reservations^{Footnote 8}: the more that borders and restrictions to mobility are enforced, the argument goes, the more that citizens’ health, within each country, will be safeguarded. Indeed, the multiplication of bordering mechanisms has been justified as part of the fight against a global health threat, and in the name of a “common [national] good”. This “nationalisation” of the protection discourse has been described by commentators under the rubric of health nationalisms. That is, the protection of the health of national populations in COVID-19 times is posited as something that can be reached only by restricting cross-border mobility and by making entry into and exit from the state conditional. The moralisation of travellers, which escalated during the pandemic, has been played out at the intersection of these two factors: the fight against a global health threat and the justification of border closures in the name of a common (national) good.

The European Commission’s proposed new “passport to freedom” – the “Digital Green Certificate” – is aimed at allowing people to travel again within the territory of the Union. Freedom of movement will, nevertheless, be conditionalPlease check that the inserted short title is correct or provide an alternative short title. on “various types of documentary evidence” related to vaccination, proof of a negative test or immunity. Along similar lines, the UK government is also planning to enforce a COVID-19 certificate later this year to regulate the entry/exit system in the country. As other papers in this special issue highlight, a variety of criticisms have been raised against these and other proposed COVID-19 certificates, noting how they risk paving the ground for discriminatory access to mobility, impacting marginalised communities in particular (as Häkli also outlines in his contribution to this issue). Despite their stated promises, these and other vaccine passports will not necessarily constitute a neat threshold in the management of the pandemic; rather, as Luiza Bialasiewicz and Alberto Alemanno observe, “they will create new borders: across the continent, across communities and even across families, divided between ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ bodies”.^{Footnote 9}

COVID-19 “passports” and certificates should, accordingly, be analysed in light of the bordering mechanisms that multiplied during COVID-19 and, more precisely, in light of the strengthening of class-based mobility. In fact, by arguing that the pandemic has triggered the re-bordering of the world I do not refer only to more borders and more restrictions to mobility: the re-bordering process has also further enforced class-based and racialised restrictions. Such accentuation is not peculiar to the pandemic: on the contrary, it could be argued that COVID-19 has shed light on the functioning of borders as such. Indeed, as Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have pointed out, far “from serving merely to block or obstruct global passages of people, money, or objects”, borders “have become central devices for their articulation. Borders play a key role in the production of the heterogeneous time and space of contemporary global and postcolonial capitalism”.^{Footnote 10} The re-bordering of the world during COVID-19 did not consist only in the temporary re-establishment of national frontiers but, as suggested above, in a multiplication of social, national and urban boundaries. I will offer some examples of this multiplication and accentuation in the paragraphs that follow.

Hygienic–sanitary reasons have long been at the core of the implementation and justification of heterogeneous borders.^{Footnote 11} The measures enforced by states against COVID-19 (face masks, social distancing measures, hand washing) should indeed be situated in a broader hygienic–sanitary rationale of governing, in which the access to mobility, social services and rights might be conditional on evidence of compliance with hygienic norms. This is, for instance, encapsulated in the UK government’s plan to use the National Health Service (NHS) app to verify that people are entitled to get a COVID-19 passport.^{Footnote 12} Relatedly, claims about public health have been progressively emptied in favour of discourses on hygienic–sanitary measures, and the former has been conflated with the latter: that is, discourses on individual protection and moral responsibility have jeopardised debates on the crisis of national public health systems. What is more, the enforcement of hygienic–sanitary borders needs to be closely scrutinised not only due to the control that these exercise on people’s movements, but also, more broadly, for the discriminatory containment measures that they legitimise on certain populations more than others, and for preventing them from becoming unquestionable interventions. By speaking of “hygienic–sanitary borders” I refer to bordering mechanisms that enact forms of racialised containment (towards migrants) and that fix rules of citizens’ good behaviour in opposition to the “irresponsible conduct” of others, all in the name of a “common good”. In fact, some marginalised communities^{Footnote 13} or populations who are criminalised as “unruly” – like the Roma – have been blamed for behaving irresponsibly.^{Footnote 14}

The very notion of a “common good” requires, indeed, to be critically unpacked: during the lockdowns, the “common good” has emerged as the outcome of repeated hygienic practices that all citizens are expected to engage in. Such hygienic–sanitary borders have also been enforced through widespread practices of peer-to-peer surveillance; that is, modes of policing that are enacted and interiorised among peers: the moralisation of unruly conducts and of individuals who do not comply with hygienic–sanitary measures have in fact consolidated the acceptance of invisible bordering mechanisms.^{Footnote 15}