German Law Journal
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were imposed first in China and then around the world as the virus itself traveled to every corner
of the globe. Under this heading, we could subsume not just travel restrictions within and across
states66 but also stay-at-home mandates that have reduced the numbers of contacts at a population
level and correlated with lower transmission rates for COVID-19 infections.67 Stay-at-home mandates, which can be thought of as “everyday mobility” restrictions, are, however, best examined
under the category of intrusions into the private lives of citizens. These are the focus of the following section. This section looks mainly at the management of borders, especially state borders,
in the context of the pandemic, and thus the impact on travel. This is a place where engagement
with the boundaries of citizenship is especially clear.
The most visible aspect of the management of borders during the course of the pandemic has
been the imposition of widespread travel bans and restrictions, including new bureaucracy around
traveling such as tests, passenger locator forms, and quarantine/isolation requirements. Yet at the
same time as travel restrictions have reduced mobility at the aggregate scale, so also various other
forms of involuntary or less-than-wholly-voluntary mobility have continued throughout the
period, even if at reduced levels.68 The involuntary mobile are not all travelers in any conventional
sense. The category includes homeless persons, who have no home to stay in,69 and migrant workers in countries like India, forced to leave the cities to return to the countryside.70 Across the world
armed conflicts—which result in displaced civilian populations—have continued or restarted,
feeding the volume of involuntary mobile persons.71
Throughout the period, some voluntary mobility has continued, especially amongst groups which
have privileged access to the extra resources, such as testing and vaccination, which are now generally
required for travel. Elite athletes, for example, have not been subject to the same travel restrictions as
others because they are frequently tested and so are not always required to quarantine in the same
way as ordinary travelers72 or have had privileged access to certain countries, as in the case of tennis
players traveling to Australia for the Australian Open tournament in 2021.73 The capacity to travel
and even to travel for vaccination purposes74 has become a new kind of luxury good, like citizenship
MAC, Volz E, Walker PGT, Walters CE, Wang H, Watson OJ, Whittaker C, Whittles LK, Xi X, Ferguson NM, Donnelly CA.,
Reduction in Mobility and COVID-19 Transmission, 12 NATURE COMMC’NS 1090 (2021).
66
For data on travel restrictions, see Lorenzo Piccoli, Jelena Dzankic, & Didier Ruedin, Citizenship, Migration and Mobility
in a Pandemic (CMMP): A Global Dataset of COVID-19 Restrictions on Human Movement, 16(3) PLOS ONE e0248066 (2021),
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7943018/.
67
Hakan Yilmazkuday, Stay-at-home Works to Fight Against COVID-19: International Evidence from Google Mobility Data,
31(1-4) J. HUM. BEHAV. SOC. ENV’T 210 (2021).
68
Leiza Brumat & Victoria Finn, Mobility and Citizenship During Pandemics: The Multilevel Political Responses in South
America, 14 PARTECIPAZIONE E CONFLITTO 321 (2021); Victoria Finn & Mari-Liis Jakobson, Mobility During Pandemics:
Moving Borders and Citizenship into Uncharted Territories, 9(5–6) COSMOS TAXIS 109 (2021), https://
cosmosandtaxis.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/finn_jakobson_ct_vol9_iss_5_6.pdf.
69
Vanessa M. Fenley, Everyday Citizenship and COVID-19: “Staying at Home” While Homeless, 43(2) ADMIN. THEORY &
PRAXIS 245 (2021).
70
Amit Prakash, Shadow of the Pandemic and the Beleaguered Liberal-Democratic Script in India, 20(2) INDIA REV. 104 (2021).
71
See data collected in COVID-19 Disorder Tracker, ACLED, https://acleddata.com/analysis/covid-19-disorder-tracker/. See
also Marius Mehri & Paul W. Thurner, The Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Global Armed Conflict: Early Evidence, 19(2)
POL. STUD. REV. 286 (2021).
72
See , e.g., Guidance from UK DEP’T DIGITAL, CULTURE, MEDIA & SPORT, Guidance on Coronavirus (COVID-19) Measures
for Elite Sport, GOV.UK (Oct. 8, 2021), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-on-coronavirus-covid-19measures-for-elite-sport.
73
The fact that tennis players and their entourages were not subject to the restrictions imposed by the cap imposed by the
Australian government has provoked strong reactions when more than 1,000 persons were allowed entry to Australia—subject
to tests and quarantine restrictions that were privately organized but supervised by the government—for the Australian Open
tennis tournament. See Sophie Williams, Tennis Stars’ Arrival Angers Stranded Australians, BBC NEWS (Jan. 16, 2021), https://
www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55683035.
74
Jemma Carr, Wealthy Members of £25,000-a-year Knightsbridge-based Travel Concierge Service Who Are Aged Over 65 Are
Being Flown to the United Arab Emirates and India on Private Jets to Receive the Covid Jab, DAILY MAIL (Jan. 14, 2021), https://
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9147557/Travel-concierge-service-charging-members-40-000-private-Covid-jab.html.
https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2021.77 Published online by Cambridge University Press