“The less we move, the more we can contain the virus”: How COVID fundamentally alters understandings of mobility and the free movement of people

Across the world, government responses to the COVID-19 crisis are leading to deep changes in our understanding of social reality. A particularly important change is that hundreds of millions of people around the world currently experience severe constraints on their mobility. While perhaps being an understandable response to the fear brought by COVID, an associated representation of mobility and free movement as danger has negative implications in the long term. Physical distancing has proved to be necessary to prevent contagion. However, the measures to enforce it have framed mobility as a danger and as a problem, and have increased the inequalities of mobility. A tendency to see mobility as a problem prevents us from seeing it as part of the solution; closing borders and restricting mobility may be necessary as short-term emergency measures but it is important to consider that they can also  hinder efforts to deal with the pandemic while also having longer-term negative effects on mobility that are corrosive of freedom.

Mobility is one of the major resources of the 21st century that can involve the movement of people, objects, ideas, knowledge and technology. A key aspect of mobility is that access to it is differential: not everyone and everything can move in the same geographical areas, under the same conditions and at the same speed. This differentiated mobility creates hierarchies: some people and some things have more ‘right to move’ than others.

Mobility also lies at the heart of regional integration projects that bring states together to cooperate with each other. These projects vary greatly, but they share a common goal of increased interaction that can include the exchange of objects, goods, ideas, knowledge, technology and, in some cases, people. Increasing mobility within a region means diminishing the internal borders between member-states. At their most ambitious, regional integration projects aim to liberalise the movement of persons and some have already done so.

This is a part of a blog post published by Leiza Brumat.