Borders in the Time of COVID-19: Professor Ayelet Shachar

Professor Ayelet Shachar, Faculty of Law and Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (photo credit: MPI-MMG 2020)

“The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the significance of borders,” says University of Toronto’s Ayelet Shachar, a professor of law, political science and global affairs at the Faculty of Law and Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Shachar’s new book,The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility (Manchester University Press), was published just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in North America.

In an online essay for Ethics & International Affairs, the quarterly journal of the Carnegie Council, Shachar uses themes from her book to examine the global border response. Borders are not based on notions of a physically imposing wall, but rather movable barriers within a legal framework.

“The fixed black lines in world atlases do not always coincide with bordering functions that may potentially take place anywhere in the world. The border has broken free of the map; it may extend well beyond the edge of a territory or well into its interior. The unmooring of state power from any fixed geographical marker has created a new paradigm: the shifting border.”

Read the full article at Ethics & International Affairs