Bordering the World in Response to Emerging Infectious Disease: The Case of SARS-CoV-2

Abstract

Facing emerging zoonose SARS-CoV-2, states decided unilaterally to close borders to individuals and revealed deep processes at work ‘bordering of the world’. Smart borders promoted by international organizations have allowed the filtering of indispensables (merchandise, data, capital and key workers) from dispensables (human beings) and, above all, the redefinition of the balance of biopolitical power between state and society. The observation of the unprecedented phenomenon of the activation and generalization of the global border machinery captures a common global dynamic. After a round-the-world tour of border closures between 21 January and 7 July 2020, we concentrate on a few emblematic cases: the Schengen zone, the USA–Canada and USA–Mexico borders, Brazil–Uruguay, Malaysia–Singapore and Morocco–Spain. We interrogate the justification and the strategies of border closure in a context of the global spread of an emerging epidemic, going beyond the simple medical argument. Choices appear to be dependent on ideological orientations henceforth dominant on the function and role of borders. We will discuss the acceleration of the bordering of the world, the forms of its outcome and its difficult reversibility

Cultural narrative, crisis, and contention in Iceland's bid to join the European Union, 2009–2015

“…The discriminatory closure of these same borders to irregular migrants and asylum seekers, who were legally confined to the first European country of arrival per the terms the EU's Dublin Agreement, became conspicuous amidst the migration crisis of the last decade. Then, in the spring of 2020, Schengen was suspended for almost everybody, as borders all over the world closed in an effort to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic (Delmas and Goeury, 2020). This policy outcome would have been unthinkable but for the immense political opportunity posed by the crisis.…”

Post-COVID symptoms in EU cross-border cooperation

“…The planned amendment of the Schengen Borders Code and other European legal acts addressing migration, human trafficking, terrorism and the pandemic leads the generalisation of strict and individualised surveillance (Dodds et al 2020;Delmas-Goeury 2020). These will have adverse effects on free movement and the feeling of freedom.…”

Interventions in critical health geopolitics: Borders, rights, and conspiracies in the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Border infrastructures have been enrolled in public health security planning. Critical scholarship on borders has focussed on the migrant crisis in and around the Mediterranean and on the US-Mexican borderlands (Delmas & Goeury, 2020), noting how EU countries and the US have used border patrols, surveillance technologies, data collection, physical barriers and legal mechanisms to deter and displace potential migrants. In the aftermath of the pandemic, these border strategies have become a great deal blunter and more varied as EU countries, in particular, have sought not only to seal their external borders but also to dismantle internal movement within the EU itself.…”