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Document Details : Title: Citizenship and Mobility Rights during a Pandemic Author(s): D'ANNIBALE, Eleonora Journal: Ethical Perspectives Volume: 31 Issue: 4 Date: 2024 Pages: 269-290 DOI: 10.2143/EP.31.4.3294102 Abstract : It is a well-known fact that different citizenships coexist within a hierarchical context. This reality has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 outbreak. While everybody has experienced temporary restrictions on their mobility rights, citizens of the global north are less affected by those limitations, in virtue of the comparative value of their passports. This has caused the aggravation of already unjust inequalities on a global scale. Measures implemented during a crisis tend to leave a legacy, if not altogether persist unchanged, after the emergency. This calls for reflection on the moral justifiability of mobility restrictions based on citizenship in the context of a pandemic and on the unjust structures that those restrictions could shape in the future. I argue that links between citizenship and exceptional measures on mobility rights should be avoided because 1) they fail to convey justifiable intuitions on the unequal mobility entitlements during a pandemic and 2) they might, given suitable conditions, foster instrumental naturalization and negatively impact the concept of democratic citizenship. Indeed, exceptional mobility restrictions during pandemics should always reflect the differential risk factors constituted by different actors in their international mobility. When this is not the case, these restrictions can inflict unjustified hardships on vulnerable minorities and result in discriminatory policies. Furthermore, linking mobility privileges to citizenship (rather than risk factors) is bound to strengthen the comparative value of certain citizenships as well as the notion of citizenship as primarily instrumentally valuable. |
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