Editor's Note

Passports afford some individuals the freedom to move across borders, while excluding others. Of the contemporary instruments of inclusion and exclusion, few are as globally known yet lacking in substantial critical-inquiry as the passport. Issues of immigration, security, freedom, rights, and identity are all foregrounded in considerations of the passport. Consequently, passports are a prime locus for committed scholarship and engaged theoretical inquiry—the kind of work that aims to not just understand the world, but also to change it.

In a world without borders, there would be, among other things, no need for passports and other forms of border control. While such a world or planetary community may only be the idealist pipe dream of the philosophers, it is one that is well known and often comes to the fore in times of border insecurity and international anxiety.

Think for example of H. G. Wells' popular proposals for a "World State" in the wake of World War I in his international best seller, The Outline of History. "Our true State, this state that is already beginning, this state to which every man owes his utmost political effort," writes Wells, "must be now this nascent Federal World State to which human necessities point" (Wells 1921, 1087). And while this "world state" never materialized and the world with borders only intensified its position on the global stage, many continued to imagine and advocate for a post-passport world. And not so long ago, this effort was quite strong.

For a period of time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a general feeling that we were moving beyond the need for passports and the movement control they facilitate. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, resulting in the lifting of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, brought about the wide-spread belief that territorialism was giving way to deterritorialism, and nationalism to postnationalism. Cosmopolitanism and its attendant notion of "cosmopolitan citizenship" remerged in this period as a viable political and social ideal, reawakening interest in the work of Immanuel Kant. In his modern cosmopolitan manifesto, the late essay, "To Perpetual Peace" (1795), which it is speculated he wrote on the occasion of the signing of the Treaty of Basel on April 5, 1795, Kant takes up the topic of the relationship of nations among themselves. For Kant, while "the single greatest problem humanity faces is forming a just civil constitution, humanity may be most threatened by the intractability nations display in the relations among themselves" (Humphrey 1988, 13). Kant's essay thus takes up the topic of the cosmopolitan state, "that state in which nations co-exist under the rule of law" as the "only one in which the rights of individuals can be fully guaranteed" (Humphrey 1988, 13).

The euphoria and optimism of the post-1989 "world-without-walls" came crashing down in the U.S. with the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Extreme nationalism and xenophobia increased in the years following and were further amplified in the extremist political rhetoric that carried the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. In this election, Hispanics, the largest ethnic or racial minority in the U.S., constituting nearly 18% of this nation's population, became the object of political, economic, and social derision through repeated calls to construct a physical wall between Mexico and the United States. Moreover, immediately after the election, the U.S. President attempted through multiple executive orders to ban individuals from countries with high Muslim populations from entering the U.S. Today, the passport has become a central political-object for a presidency aiming to turn back the U.S. clock to more nativist and nationalistic periods in our history: after all the political slogan of our times is "Make America Great Again."

The list of border and population control initiatives though led by the U.S. is not limited to this country. Brexit, where the U.K. left the European Union, and an increase of nationalism among countries in the U.K., does not exempt the...