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licensing terms for “licensed” humanitarian actors (and the supply chain related
thereto) should be favourably set at preferential rates.
9 Conclusions
People are on the move today as they always have been, but with a caveat: for the first
time in human history, the planet is entirely fragmented into bordered areas we use
to call “States” and whose borders are factually impenetrable due to extensive surveillance, monitoring, patrolling, and “defence” technology being deployed – where
these are missing, that is just because natural barriers (like oceans, uncrossable
rivers, extensive deserts, polar areas, or high mountains) are supposed to fence most
migrants off on their behalf. This hyper-securitised parcellation of the globe comes
exactly at a time when surreptitious forms of apartheid are most sensitive and
escalating fast, including unprecedented expressions of class and especially climate
apartheid (Clark and Mitchell 2021; Hall and Weiss 2012; McCordick 2021; Rice, Long,
and Levenda 2021).
Deeper and context-sensitive research is therefore warranted to identify those
identity onboarding technology solutions that can accommodate these vulnerabilities while still catering for States’ unfortunate resolution to manage migration flows
at their borders. More specifically, the role of the introducer deserves far more policy
and legal space than it has enjoyed until today: no guidance on its function, profile, and
procedures is traceable in PIL documents, but not even within policy reports or the
most recent domestic laws on migration matters! This work, drawing on sources
from the entire spectrum of the social sciences, but mainly drafted doctrinally and
addressed to sociolegal scholars, intended to mark the first step in this direction, but
more “frontier” and interdisciplinary research is needed to capture the sociolegal
implications of deploying identity onboarding solutions vis-à-vis individuals in
“borderline” situations. For instance, KYC solutions for remote customer onboarding
in the banking sectors are frequently illustrated with technical flowcharts, even
within official policy documents (e.g. PwC 2018, 53); the same effort should be made
with scenarios of borderline citizenship, where the remote identity onboarding of
individuals becomes extremely complex technically and operationally, but also
legally, diplomacy-wise, and “geopolitically”.
Pledged research should account for the distinctions and overlaps between
identity, nationality, and citizenship; it should review the role and effectiveness of
the introducer in borderline contexts across different socio-legal cultures through
comparative ethnographic lenses; and it should formulate proposals for publicprivate partnerships towards defining inclusionary, accountable, and balanced
standards to facilitate cross-border identity management. It should do so by mapping