The International Health Regulations, COVID-19, and bordering practices: Who gets in, what gets out, and who gets rescued?

It is often said that “diseases know no borders,” but COVID-19 has once again shown that policy responses certainly do. Governments have implemented bordering practices in a variety of ways to ensure that their own citizens are protected, even when in direct contravention to the International Health Regulations (IHR) of 2005. The IHR and the World Health Organization (WHO) have a strong preference for borders to remain open. Yet, we argue here, non-compliance by WHO member states is not the only problem with the IHR’s treatment of borders. Bringing insights from critical border studies and exploring the varied ways in which the response to the COVID-19 crisis has been “bordered,” we argue that a much broader understanding of “borders” is required in the IHR and by the WHO, given that much of the exclusionary bordering we find takes place away from physical points of entry.