Humanitarian Borders, Safe Passage Campaigns, and the (Re)Production of Unequal Mobility

This article revisits the scholarly debates and activist actions around what have become known as ‘humanitarian borders’. The article shows how humanitarian borders—where border crossing for those denied access to safe and legal forms of travel has become a matter of life and death necessitating humanitarian responses—are rooted in racialized mobility injustice. Further, the article critically interrogates demands for safe passage by two organizations, the medical humanitarian international non-governmental organization Médecins Sans Frontières and the legal non-governmental organization Safe Passage UK that emerged as a humanitarian and activist demand to challenge the mobility injustice of humanitarian borders. In doing so, the article argues that such demands, through failing to demand visa-free travel and access to existing commercial transportation such as flights, ferries, and trains, unintentionally (re)produce unequal differentiations in mobility rights and access between those who are assumed to have free access to safe travel, and those for whom alternate forms of safe passage—physical and legal—must be additionally provided.