Christin Achermann, Janine Dahinden and Francisco Klauser

Towards a Novel Mobility Regime? The Legacies of the COVID-19 Pandemic Regarding the Governance of Human Movement

The policy response to COVID-19 has involved extraordinary efforts to govern human movement and resulted in differing degrees of openness and closure at various scales. This project investigates the past and future legacies of these efforts: it studies how the measures have affected how the governance of human movement is being conceived, implemented, technologically mediated, and lived.

We apply a qualitative approach focused on three work packages (a baseline study and two in-depth case studies) covering the following fields: Governance of national borders; Monitoring of people on the move ; Control of spatial security enclaves. For each field, we analyze the logics of bordering, boundary-making and securitization inherent in the responses to COVID-19.

On this basis, the project develops an integrative theoretical model to understand the particular mobility regime that crystallized at the critical junctural moment of the COVID-19 crisis.

Project-related scientific publications Select publication   Piccoli, Lorenzo, Matteo Gianni, Didier Ruedin, Christin Achermann, Janine Dahinden, Paula Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik, Mihaela Nedelcu and Tania Zittoun What Is the Nexus between Migration and Mobility? A Framework to Understand the Interplay between Different Ideal Types of Human Movement 2024   Dahinden, Janine Deterritorialized and unfinished “integration nations”? 2023   Manser-Egli, Stefan Respecting the values of the constitution: Integration in the community of value(s) 2023