Qatar, the Coronavirus, and Cordons Sanitaires: Migrant Workers and the Use of Public Health Measures to Define the Nation

Abstract

This article looks at the use of public health strategies to define political membership in the nation. I examine the use of the cordon sanitaire to mitigate the novel coronavirus in Qatar. I argue that it acts primarily as a boundary to map out zones of political exclusion, splitting those who are entitled to protection from disease from those who are not. Through an analysis of the logic, application, and history of the cordon sanitaire in Qatar and elsewhere, I argue that it is only a more explicit example of the ways that governments have applied public health measures such that they apportion exposure to COVID‐19, protecting some while mandating exposure for others. Exposure, or protection from it, has become a means to spatialize power and territorialize the national imaginary, separating full members from those who are excluded and reduced to their economic function.

Praying for More Time: Mexican Immigrants’ Pandemic Eldercare Dilemmas

“…Scholars have amply documented the way the pandemic disparately affected experiences of space. They have analyzed the extensive immigration restrictions enacted in the name of protecting public health, including lockdown orders, border closures and visa restrictions, and cordons sanitaires (Castañeda and López 2020;Iskander 2020;Remes 2020). They have called attention to the role that disparate access to housing (Wahlberg et al 2021) as well as residential segregation (White et al 2021) have played in exacerbating infection rates.…”

Negotiating expendability in crisis

“…For example, in 2020, as policy makers drafted guidelines to curb the Covid‐19 pandemic, “essential” and “nonessential” became salient classifications of activities. Workers across industries found their livelihoods classified as one or the other, and, as such, placed in an altered relationship to the state and its biopolitics (Gálvez, Carney, and Yates‐Doerr 2020; Iskander 2020; Lennon 2020). 5 Some who found themselves in the new class of essential workers may have had stable income, but with it came greater exposure to the risk of infection, while many of those deemed nonessential lost their jobs, along with the basic necessities that wages allowed, and became welfare recipients.…”

An enclave entrepôt: The informal migration industry and Johannesburg’s socio-spatial transformation

“…Several interlinked agents and processes constitute the migration infrastructures that enable or hinder departure, journey, arrival and access to employment of labour migrants (Zack et al, 2019). Yet, unlike state-sanctioned transnational migration movements formally organised through elaborate recruitment and placement schemes (see Iskander, 2020; Wee et al, 2018), these are managed by neither states nor formal recruitment agencies. Instead, many moving to and through Johannesburg rely on the entrepôt’s social and material infrastructure as part of a migration industry.…”

“…On arrival, people interact with markets and policies that restrict and facilitate patterns of movement, housing, trade and labour. Scholarship on the Gulf States, Singapore and Hong Kong draws attention to the importance of specific labour recruitment policies and local institutions in shaping the movements and impacts of people coming for work (see Iskander, 2020; Kathiravelu, 2016; Ye, 2018). Elsewhere, the focus is largely on supply chains and corporate-led isomorphism.…”