Managing Internationally Mobile Bodies in a World on Hold: Migration, Tourism, and Biological Citizenship in the Context of COVID-19

The novelty and severity of the virus and the ease with which COVID-19 is transmitted have led to far-reaching and unprecedented international travel restrictions. This chapter focuses on the ways in which national governments scrambled at a moment of unprecedented crisis to manage different forms of international mobility on which they have grown increasingly dependent over the last decades. It uses the concept of ‘biological citizenship’ as a lens through which to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic offers new perspective on age-old political dilemmas of controlling the spread of contagion and its management. Through that lens, the emergence of novel spatio-relational configurations of ‘biological trust’ in the form of bubbles, bridges, and corridors; biological risk loopholes legitimizing the resumed movement of ‘high value’-‘low volume’ flows; and biologically inclusive regularizations policies can be seen. The chapter argues for the need to make increasingly visible the ways in which our biological identities articulate with our political identities in a highly globalized world.