Immunity Passports, "Vaccinated Travel", and the Governance of Mobility across South Africa’s Borders with Zimbabwe and Botswana after Covid-19
Two futures face Southern Africa in the wake of Covid-19. First, there is an emerging global trend towards vaccination or proof of virus testing – ‘or immunity passports’ – as a condition for cross-border travel. Second, contrary to the first, there is a growing informalization of cross-border mobility in the region. Using the cases of the Beitbridge border port-of-entry of South Africa and Zimbabwe, and the Kopfontein border port-of-entry of South Africa and Botswana, this project explores how mobility governance southern Africa is responding to the pandemic and establishing a pattern for the future. What lessons can be drawn from the two border posts as regards future cross-border mobility?
Through document and policy analysis, expert interviews, and participant-observation fieldwork, the project explores an emerging global border regime in which the governance of international mobility appears to be characterized by systems that connect states to institutions that now collapse borders with epidemiology and thus operate in spaces ‘between public health, the state, and supranational organizations’ (Papadopoulos, et al., 2008) Such systems drag the collective health of individuals into the management of border systems. The Southern African case is particularly relevant as it so clearly and instructively exhibits a conflict of interests that is now of global relevance: the conflict between a need mobile foreign workers and concerns for public health.
Through document and policy analysis, expert interviews, and participant-observation fieldwork, the project explores an emerging global border regime in which the governance of international mobility appears to be characterized by systems that connect states to institutions that now collapse borders with epidemiology and thus operate in spaces ‘between public health, the state, and supranational organizations’ (Papadopoulos, et al., 2008) Such systems drag the collective health of individuals into the management of border systems. The Southern African case is particularly relevant as it so clearly and instructively exhibits a conflict of interests that is now of global relevance: the conflict between a need mobile foreign workers and concerns for public health.
Final report
The project has been a highlight of my career. It anchored my Post Doctoral career. I was fortunate to get the grant soon after Covid 19 hit, which made it possible to think through how pandemics and social organisation interact.
I started by exploring how people managed their lives through a pandemic. Eventually, I was able to explore how broader politics, statecraft and pandemics interact to furnish the kind of responses that made Southern Africa cope with Covid 19.
In this project, I have discovered that pandemics and everyday life exist degrees of disjuncture and continuity. For migrants, to which this study confined itself, difficulties of movement due to sickness, curtailed mobility, and broader restriction that were related to international mobility and stricter border enforcement engender both setbacks and opportunity. Mobility in times of catastrophe was an added challenge, but the need to pay more, for transport, at international borders, as well as to counter reduced supply chains in the regular economy, offered a challenge for many migrants. Nonetheless, the opportunity to make money from the misery that the pandemic introduced made cross border travel lucrative to transporters and state officials.
I was fascinating with how pandemics provide space for southern African governments to be a bit more authoritarian. Although the biosecuritization of cross-border mobility has increasingly become a feature of many states in the present, it has been eye-opening to see how public emergencies such as Covid 19 have easily trigger authoritarian tendencies, what I call ‘oppression memory’, of states. Pandemics have a way of awakening political monsters that lurk in the vicinity of everyday society.
Although international mobility is an everyday norm, and in many cases inevitable, regional coordination regarding this movement is far from efficient. Covid 19 demonstrated how dissimilar protocols between sending and receiving countries made it difficult, confusing and otherwise unpredictable for migrants to move across borders at this difficult time. The governance of the pandemic in the region exposed how states act independently, even if they rely on each other for labour, logistics and trade.
This project also documented the stories of how people lived with the pandemic. Morose immobility, probably the best way of describing living with the pandemic, captures how fear, loss, and deprivation characterised the lives of many migrants who got separated and isolated from relatives and everyday life. Taken to its logical end, migrant melancholia addresses existential dilemmas around the meaning and possibility of isolated death in strange lands.
The pandemic also became an opportunity for those that profit from misery. This resulted above all, in the monetization of corona related relations of enforcement, and the instrumentalization of the sacredness of death. This amplified further the commodification and associated meanings of border crossings, as well as the idea mobility in the region. By re-reframing monetized exchanges as offering to the dead, only through whom allowance for border crossings and continued labour migration could be secured, the pandemic entrenched symbolic and material relations between the living, the dead, and significations of border enforcement.
I started by exploring how people managed their lives through a pandemic. Eventually, I was able to explore how broader politics, statecraft and pandemics interact to furnish the kind of responses that made Southern Africa cope with Covid 19.
In this project, I have discovered that pandemics and everyday life exist degrees of disjuncture and continuity. For migrants, to which this study confined itself, difficulties of movement due to sickness, curtailed mobility, and broader restriction that were related to international mobility and stricter border enforcement engender both setbacks and opportunity. Mobility in times of catastrophe was an added challenge, but the need to pay more, for transport, at international borders, as well as to counter reduced supply chains in the regular economy, offered a challenge for many migrants. Nonetheless, the opportunity to make money from the misery that the pandemic introduced made cross border travel lucrative to transporters and state officials.
I was fascinating with how pandemics provide space for southern African governments to be a bit more authoritarian. Although the biosecuritization of cross-border mobility has increasingly become a feature of many states in the present, it has been eye-opening to see how public emergencies such as Covid 19 have easily trigger authoritarian tendencies, what I call ‘oppression memory’, of states. Pandemics have a way of awakening political monsters that lurk in the vicinity of everyday society.
Although international mobility is an everyday norm, and in many cases inevitable, regional coordination regarding this movement is far from efficient. Covid 19 demonstrated how dissimilar protocols between sending and receiving countries made it difficult, confusing and otherwise unpredictable for migrants to move across borders at this difficult time. The governance of the pandemic in the region exposed how states act independently, even if they rely on each other for labour, logistics and trade.
This project also documented the stories of how people lived with the pandemic. Morose immobility, probably the best way of describing living with the pandemic, captures how fear, loss, and deprivation characterised the lives of many migrants who got separated and isolated from relatives and everyday life. Taken to its logical end, migrant melancholia addresses existential dilemmas around the meaning and possibility of isolated death in strange lands.
The pandemic also became an opportunity for those that profit from misery. This resulted above all, in the monetization of corona related relations of enforcement, and the instrumentalization of the sacredness of death. This amplified further the commodification and associated meanings of border crossings, as well as the idea mobility in the region. By re-reframing monetized exchanges as offering to the dead, only through whom allowance for border crossings and continued labour migration could be secured, the pandemic entrenched symbolic and material relations between the living, the dead, and significations of border enforcement.