Pandemic as revelation: what does it tell us about people on the move?

What is the pandemic telling us about people on the move? In this blog posted on the website of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, anthropologist Alessandro Monsutti and co-founder of UAI Antonio Donini note that the pandemic seems to have produced new regimes of “unfreedom”, and especially of “unfreedom of movement”, in an insalubrious mix of biopolitics and eugenics. In the new world of biosecurity, solidarity and the risks of crossing borders are only for the fittest. For migrants, this is tantamount to a double vulnerability. Fear of the pandemic and fear of the “other” combine into a hardening of nationalistic and xenophobic discourses.

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