Lori Publishes Article on the Global Mobility Rights
Noora Lori, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published an article for the European University Institute’s (EUI) Global Citizenship Observatory in which she discusses the struggles of displaced individuals and the need for special “mobility passports.”
In the article, titled “Mobility without membership: Do we need special passports for vulnerable groups?,” Lori sets up the challenge of why we need mobility rights and why stateless populations and displaced persons need them the most. She then discusses the global mobility market – citizenship by investment schemes – that makes mobility accessible to high-net-worth individuals and provides policy prescriptions for extending this mobility market to vulnerable groups including the potential pitfalls of “special passports” or mobility rights in the absence of full membership rights.
An excerpt:
The limited number of displaced persons who are able to resettle to the Global North under current asylum and immigration pathways have to wait long periods of time to acquire citizenship statuses that would provide them with “stronger” passports and greater mobility rights. The challenge at hand is whether – with a healthy dose of imagination – we might conceptualize ways of granting vulnerable groups (likely temporary) mobility rights in the absence of full membership rights in response to specific crises. This would essentially require states to introduce different passport streams to verify the identity and “vouch” for different population categories: their own citizens and non-citizens who meet the criteria of “the necessity of flight.”
The full article can be read on EUI’s website.
Noora Lori’s research broadly focuses on the political economy of migration, the development of security institutions and international migration control, and the establishment and growth of national identity systems. She is particularly interested in the study of temporary worker programs and racial hierarchies in comparative perspective. Regionally, her work examines the shifting population movements accompanying state formation in the Persian Gulf, expanding the study of Middle East politics to include historic and new connections with East Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Lori is the Founding Director of the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking. Read more about Professor Lori on her faculty profile.