OVERCOMING INSECURITIES: THE FUTURE OF HUMAN MOBILITY REGIMES.

• Author: Naujoks, Daniel

INTRODUCTION

A hard look at today's discourses, attitudes, and policies on human mobility often evokes a bleak picture. (i) Human mobility--a broad term that includes issues related to immigration, emigration, displacement, return, and diaspora relations (1)--is frequently associated with crisis, and many states apply securitized approaches that treat people on the move as threats to national security, identity, and economic interests. It often feels as if states successfully erect figurative (and sometimes very concrete) walls around what they see as the last bastion of sovereignty: migrant and refugee admissions. Governments attempt to immobilize populations or to keep them far from their borders, which creates and exacerbates their hardships, vulnerabilities, and insecurities. (2)

Contrary to this policy stance, human mobility is a quintessential adaptation strategy that has the potential to lead to significant human development improvements for those on the move, the communities that receive them, and the communities from which they originate. Steeped in the day-to-day struggles of advancing a more just and effective governance of human mobility, it is easy to overlook important macro trends that take place over time. If we take a long-term perspective, states' hegemony over these issues are less pronounced. And while I too am impatient with the pace of progress, in this essay I will lay out three areas of change, which make me optimistic about the emergence of a more inclusive and equitable governance of mobility in the future. I believe that by the year 2100, a combination of (1) advances in norms related to human mobility; (2) changes in the system of global governance; and (3) demographic and technological changes will ultimately produce global, regional, and national regimes for human mobility that are safer, fairer, and more sustainable.

LOOKING BACK TO LOOK AHEAD

To overcome status quo bias, it is helpful to look back at key changes that have occurred in the past 75 years. In 1946, the year prior to the founding of the Journal of International Affairs, the membership of the still-new United Nations (UN) comprised merely 35 countries. After 1960, decolonization of European colonies added another three dozen new states in Asia and Africa. This process, as well as the formation of new states, led to the current UN membership of 193 independent countries. (ii) The global community had not yet adopted the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, any of the core UN's human rights treaties, (iii) or the 1951 UN Refugee convention and its 1967 Protocol that made refugee protections global. And neither the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) nor the International organization for Migration (IOM) had been established. (iv)

In today's world, it is hard to think about international movements without passports and visas. However, Torpey's (2018) historical deep-dive into the "invention of the passport" shows that these travel documents are not only a recent invention, the wide-spread use of which is connected to World War I, but that there were strong calls for their abolition after World War II as a means for states to monopolize the movement of persons. (3) Thus, maybe a world without passports is less Utopian than we commonly assume.

This illustrates that even over a relatively short period of time, significant developments can take place. What then are the key factors that will determine mobility regimes in 2100?

Speculating how human society could be politically organized in 300 years, Wimmer (2021) envisions five different scenarios, namely an "anarchic scenario without any states, a scenario with a thousand or more ministates based on shared cultural identities, an imperial scenario with a few states each claiming to represent an entire civilization, a world with culturally heterogeneous and highly efficient Continental states and finally a world state." (4) Although the predictions in this essay do not look as far ahead as that, future studies show that foretelling the times to come is fraught with challenges. (5) To forecast the next 75 years, I will use insights from processes that are unfolding today at the global, regional, national, and local levels. Unavoidably, the predictions are based on observations and judgments that may not be shared by other analysts. I have, however, attempted to make it clear what the predictions are based on.

CHANGING NORMS ABOUT HUMAN MOBILITY

The last three quarters of a century have brought about many important normative changes. Some pertain to the international system of governance and its implications for the extent and limits of sovereignty. Other changes relate specifically to ideas and norms about human mobility.

During the past 75 years, the global community has adopted the most important human rights treaties and established monitoring bodies to push for their implementation. This is not limited to the core human treaties I mentioned above, but to a plethora of global and regional treaties. (6) Needless to say their effective implementation is faulty, and the lack of robust enforcement mechanisms means that several countries flagrantly violate core norms on a regular basis. (7) Despite its shortcomings, it's important to highlight how the global human rights system has in fact influenced state behavior. Massive human rights violations are now recognized as a reason for the UN Security Council to become active, which might even elicit military intervention, authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, to prevent mass atrocities under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. (8) Potential refugee flows can be regarded as "threats to the peace," and hence trigger the UN's collective security mechanisms. (9) Today, many issues that used to fall under states' internal affairs and that were thus shielded from international interventions lead to global involvement. Soysal (1994) coined the term postnational citizenship to emphasize that regimes beyond the nation state have significant influence over individual rights in nation states. (10) Whereas national citizenship is not waning completely, the impact of global norms, treaties, institutions, and processes on what used to fall squarely under the purview of states is indicative of the slowly changing role of the nation state.

Many refugee scholars and practitioners have questioned whether the refugee definition in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol is still adequate to deal with today's (let alone future) forms of displacement. (11) In fact, only a fraction of the world's 27 million refugees have so-called Convention Refugee status, and state actors and UN agencies use a variety of definitions. (12) This includes the definition of Palestinian refugees under the mandate of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA); people in refugee-like situation, who "face protection risks similar to those of refugees, but for whom refugee status has, for practical or other reasons, not been ascertained;" (13) as well as persons who fall under a regional definition, namely the 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, and the non-binding 1984 Cartagena Declaration for South America. Importantly, statistics also include those who are admitted for complementary, subsidiary, or temporary forms of protection. (14)

Refugee advocates are reluctant to open up new negotiations of what it means to be a refugee, as they fear that, contrary to what is needed, newly-negotiated definitions and legal regimes may be less inclusive and provide fewer rights and safeguards or let countries insert exceptions and loopholes through which they can circumvent real obligations. This is the reason why the UN Global Compact on Refugees, which was adopted in 2018, is limited to expanding the implementation of refugee policies, without attempting to change the scope of refugee protections. (15)

In the long run, though, I predict that the global community will adjust the legal definitions of those enjoying international protection. Accounting for the impact of climate disasters on displacement, advocates are rapidly enhancing our knowledge of the empirical links, (16) as well as the legal clarity of concepts related to environmentally-induced displacement. (17) Initiatives like the state-led Platform on Disaster Displacement are actively promoting policy and normative development to address the protection needs of displaced persons across...