The Case for Vaccine Cosmopolitanism

Vaccine passports without vaccine harmonization would tear the entire world apart and suspend the human right―the right of free movement―of the world’s poorest people. Mobility apartheid is an assault on cosmopolitanism that might be the perennial condition of the poorest nations in Africa.

Written by Promise Frank Ejiofor

May 26, 2021

Mobility apartheid is an assault on cosmopolitanism that might be the perennial condition of the poorest nations in Africa. US EMBASSY AND CONSULATE IN NIGERIA

‘Ours is a world in which no individual, and no country, exists in isolation. All of us live simultaneously in our own communities and in the world at large.’

― Kofi A. Annan

Depending on how you look at it, the coronavirus pandemic has normalized uncertainty as a way of being in the world. Stability now appears more as an aspiration than as an immutable feature of human life. In the midst of this global catastrophe―what the late UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, would call a ‘problem without passport’―the prospect of vaccine passports seems to offer respite from the ravages of COVID-19. This is precisely why the European Union (EU) has proposed vaccination certificates as a strategy to facilitate travel and vacations within the bloc as well as boost the moribund tourism industry. China, Bahrain, Australia, New Zealand, and several other countries have followed suit.

Whilst the idea of inoculation certificate is very attractive and may ensure freedom of mobility, it masks the intrinsic inequalities and equalities that exist today as a result of neoliberal governmentality―the dominant mode of thought and praxis that couches international mobility as a function of capital in the most industrialized regions. There is the tendency that vaccine passports, if not backed with vaccine harmonization, will produce a novel ‘mobility apartheid’ with movements circulating more within states and regions rather on a global level. States and regions―through border ossifications―transmogrify into segregated spaces for the vaccinated privileged people in the West.

I understand ‘mobility apartheid’ as the emergent restrictions that feed on existing precarities to split the universe into privileged mobility classes based on access to vaccines. Passport power―hinged on the ability to enter other countries without requiring visas―is not just tinged with class proclivities but also strategically racialized so that borders tend to structure a supposed hierarchy of humanity. It is no coincidence, then, that access to vaccines has been structured along the usual capitalist lines with the richest nations wrestling between and amongst themselves to inoculate their populations before the rest of the world.

Vaccine passports devoid of vaccine harmonization will potentially reinforce global inequality especially with regard to mobility. Poorer members of society, who are already the most immobile on our planet, are likely to have an additional layer of restriction on their right to free movement. The end of the pandemic, however, cannot come about with inoculation passports but with the global distribution of vaccines which requires collaboration and empathy between the richest and poorest nations.

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About the Author

Promise Frank Ejiofor

holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His research interests lie at the intersection of nationalism, citizenship, ethnic politics, and international security.

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The Case for Vaccine Cosmopolitanism