The Power of Passports: How Paper Booklets Became Tools of Global Stratification

A passport is arguably the ultimate symbol of borders carried in one’s pocket. For some, it is a key to mobility; for others, an expression of the liabilities of citizenship. Attesting citizenship, passports and other travel documents determine what one can do where and under what conditions, including the ability to cross borders and live and work in particular places. A passport might thus be considered a vital attribute of the modern stratification of the world, with some passports providing easier access for travel, work, and residence to vastly more countries than others.

Passports from countries of the European Union allow for tourism and work hassle-free in dozens of jurisdictions, while documents issued by the United Kingdom, North American countries, and parts of East Asia are generally considered to provide seamless access to the largest number of countries for tourism purposes. While there are plenty of levels in between, passports from conflict-affected countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria are virtually unsuitable for international travel. Standardized identities, which passports provide, make individuals “legible” to authorities at home and abroad, enabling states to exert control over complex societies by enforcing a legal identity on their citizens, defining key attributes such as official names, origins, and genders.

Yet despite their central role in modern legal identification and international mobility, passports are a relatively new invention. Although they are absolutely indispensable for international travel today, passports were almost unheard of in the early 20th century. Despite the near-ubiquitous digitization of modern life, these little paper booklets have stubbornly remained the central tool for crossing borders. They also serve as legal manifestations of Pierre Bordieu’s “world-making” practice of embodying symbolic power; they are vehicles for controlling populations, both migrant and sedentary, pointing holders to their place in a world hierarchy of rights, privileges, and liabilities.

This article examines the international law of passports and the legal framework for issuing and recognizing travel documents. As much as passports are about mobility, they also can lead to immobility, serving as tools for states to distinguish between purported desirable and undesirable travelers, for whom arduous visa procedures and restrictive if not insurmountable border controls make crossing borders impossible.

History of Passports and their Usage

Historically, the legal ability to travel both domestically and internationally was directly connected to race, ethnicity, and class, rather than nationality. Before World War I, passports and other identity documents were not frequently required for crossing international borders; state practices varied widely. Letters of safe passage were issued by a variety of authorities, including the church or local officials often unrelated to the state of nationality of the traveler. Use of passports spread following the spike of nationalism after World War I. Many European countries installed border controls and instituted travel document requirements during the Great War and were unwilling to abolish them afterwards. Since then, travel restrictions have been officially based on nationality, irrespective of class, although discrimination based on sex and race has played a fundamental role.

Aiming to gradually abolish travel restrictions, the League of Nations organized a series of passport conferences beginning in the 1920s. While failing in its goal to abolish the passport requirements, the conferences resulted in the first international standards for the format of such documents to facilitate their recognition and trustworthiness against fraud. The British passport emerged as the gold standard. This provided the groundwork for a system of stringent border controls and immigration restrictions that remains in place today. International standards solidified the travel control regime, initially based on both nationality and race, although race was later abandoned (at least officially).

Travel Documents: An Overview

The modern passport regime is based on presenting a picture ID issued by the holder’s country of citizenship or, when unavailable, permanent residence. International and domestic law generally permits states to regulate the entry of foreign nationals into their territory, and travel documents allow authorities to assess people at the border. This holds true even as pre-travel authorizations (such as the U.S. Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, and the similar EU ETIAS requirement taking effect this year) have become more common, requiring travelers even passing between visa-free countries to notify authorities in advance. Ordinary passports are generally issued by states to citizens and are commonly issued as 28- or 54-page booklets with a data page. The United States and Ireland also issue booklet-less “passport cards” that are accepted by a limited number of nations. Multilateral or bilateral agreements often accept national identity cards as travel documents, such as for travelers within the European Union or in some neighboring countries.

States also frequently issue special travel documents to certain groups of noncitizens, Examples include passports for refugees (especially Convention Travel Documents, which must be recognized by signatories of the 1951 Refugee Convention), passports and identity certificates for stateless persons, and so-called alien’s passports which some states issue to resident noncitizens who are unable to obtain travel documents elsewhere.

Diplomatic passports are commonly issued to government officials—but not exclusively accredited diplomats—and their family members, and are not necessarily proof of nationality. States might impose certain restrictions regarding these passports, such as allowing their usage only for official travel. Governments may also issue various types of official, service, or special passports to government officials and their family members.

Quirks in the System

International law does not restrict states from granting travel documents to noncitizens, and there are numerous ways that governments have found to do so, including Panama’s “investment passports,” which are widely accepted but do not require Panamanian nationality. While this may seem similar to the citizenship-by-investment programs offered by countries including Saint Kitts and Nevis or Vanuatu, a crucial difference is that Panama’s offerings only confer a travel document and not citizenship. Moluccans from Indonesia’s Maluku Islands who live in the Netherlands are entitled to ordinary Dutch passports but are not themselves Dutch citizens. Similarly, American Samoans are entitled to U.S. passports at birth but must undergo naturalization to acquire full rights as U.S. citizens. There are also inverse examples: Immigrants who become naturalized citizens of Uruguay are nonetheless unable to obtain Uruguayan passports that can be used for international travel.

Nor are states the only ones that issue travel documents. International organizations such as the United Nations also issue documents to facilitate staffers’ travel. These documents are often referred to as a laissez-passer, although their validity might be similar to that of other travel documents and, in a world where access to international travel is deeply uneven, these kinds of documents may allow staffers of nationalities that tend to face travel restrictions to move more easily. Internationally recognized sovereign entities other than states—including the Sovereign Order of Malta and the Holy See—can also issue passports that are good for travel.

The mobility of stateless persons and forcibly displaced people can be hindered by their inability to obtain travel documents, as many displaced Russians and, later, Armenians faced between the World Wars, leading to the development of the Nansen passport for these categories of individuals. The 1951 Refugee Convention requires signatories to issue a travel document to recognized refugees, unless there are compelling concerns related to national security or public order. The 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons contains a similar requirement. The European Court of Human Rights’ 2018 decision in Hoti v. Croatia reaffirmed that stateless people do not need to naturalize to enjoy rights in their state of residence, including the right to be issued sufficient documentation. In addition, states may issue other travel documents to immigrants (often referred to as “aliens’ passports”) on the basis of domestic law, for example to people who cannot obtain them elsewhere. Such documents are issued by some countries that have not ratified either convention; one example is the Singaporean Certificate of Identity for stateless people.

Modern Standards for Travel Documents

While issuance of travel documents is in principle a matter of domestic law, states generally adhere to the standards described in Annex 9 of the 1944 Chicago Convention on civil aviation. Since 1980, this has included standards for machine-readable travel documents, which contain one to three lines of text for machines to scan to facilitate faster processing. Some passports contain a chip with the holder’s biometric data. Member States of several regional organizations including the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the European Union also issue documents that share certain features.

Key Functions of Travel Documents

Travel documents typically offer basic information about the holder’s identity and nationality. However, travel documents are generally only accepted as prima facie evidence of nationality and are therefore not regarded as conclusive proof. For destination countries, they can also guarantee that travelers or migrants can be returned to their place of origin if needed or once their legal stay ends. International law requires each state to admit its own nationals and, legal scholars generally agree, noncitizens with travel documents issued by that government. As such, states might refuse to recognize travel documents if they do not ensure returnability, as the United States does.

States also commonly accept travel documents if they were issued by a state they recognize, even if others do not. So Russia would accept passports issued by the separatist Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia, and Turkey the passports of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The same is true for states no longer in control of their territory, such as Baltic States under Soviet occupation or Austria following its annexation by Nazi Germany; passports of these states were nonetheless recognized by the United States. States might equally accept travel documents from states they do not recognize (for instance, Greece accepted passports from the ex-Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Russia accepts those from Kosovo, and the United States accepts those from Northern Cyprus), states lacking general recognition (including Palestine and Taiwan), territories without statehood (such as, before 1993, the Condominium of Andorra), or non-territorial entities (such as the Holy See or the Sovereign Military Order of Malta). The opposite is true of documents deemed to be illegally issued in occupied territories; for instance, EU Member States do not recognize Russian passports issued in Russian-occupied regions in Ukraine or breakaway territories in Georgia.

International law does not require travel documents be issued by central authorities, allowing subnational entities—such as those in Hong Kong and Macau, the Faroe Islands, the Island of Man, and Greenland—to issue their own passports.

In some cases, states refuse to accept travel documents if they do not adhere to certain security standards or if they lack certain data. For example, Germany has refused to recognize Vietnamese passports lacking information on the bearer’s birthplace.

Is There a Right to Passports?

The issuance of travel documents remains an issue for individual governments. States generally have laws allowing citizens to obtain a travel document, although there are numerous exceptions. In the United Kingdom, for example, the issuance of travel documents is not based on law and is at the discretion of the authorities.

Nonetheless, international law does impose certain limitations on states’ discretion, the most important of which is the right to leave any country—including one’s own. This right is enshrined in numerous international human-rights law instruments, most importantly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which includes exceptions to protect national security, public order, public health or morals, or the rights and freedoms of others. It is generally accepted that in order to enable people to exercise this right, authorities much also issue travel documents such as passports. On numerous occasions, the UN Human Rights Committee, which is tasked with monitoring ICCPR compliance, has concluded that the denial or revocation of a passport without valid justification constitutes a violation of the covenant. The European Convention on Human Rights contains a similar provision guaranteeing the right to leave any country, and it is established case law of the European Court of Human Rights that denying an identity document such as a passport amounts to an interference with the exercise of liberty of movement.

The Power of Passports

Travel documents serve primarily as carriers of personal and biometric data. Historians have emphasized how passports and other identity documents became a crucial tool for states to enforce a legal identity on their citizens, defining key attributes such as official name, origin, and sex. The issue of gender remains particularly contentious today, as demonstrated by the Trump administration's revocation of the “X” marker on travel documents and its mandate that individuals be identified by their sex at birth, not their preferred gender—raising significant personal and logistical challenges for the trans community. Certain countries, for example Saudi Arabia, do not recognize passports with an X or U marker issued by other countries.

Digitalization facilitates assessing and sharing passport data, easing international travel for some while making borders more impenetrable for those with a less powerful passport—or none at all. Considering this essential role, it is unsurprising that an objective of the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration is to ensure that all migrants have proof of legal identity and adequate documentation. This call has led to increased attention on Global South countries offering limited access to travel or other identity documents. By sharing passenger information and name records, moreover, border authorities can scrutinize travel data before a passenger arrives. Digitization also means border checks have become more comprehensive and rigid. One example is the European Commission’s recent decision to integrate checks on travel document recognition in the Schengen Information System, which is a digital system for information sharing among Member State border authorities. In practice, this means a heretofore manual (and incidental) check of whether the travel document is recognized will turn into an automatic one. This will likely raise problems for travelers with documents that are not recognized by every Member State (such as certain travel documents for stateless persons).

Passports are obviously essential for crossing international borders, but they can also be crucial elsewhere in the migration process. For example, acquiring a residence permit often requires showing a valid foreign passport; if one’s country of origin subsequently revokes the passport or refuses to renew it, this can have consequences for residence status. In some countries, naturalization is in principle only possible upon showing a valid foreign travel document. In the Netherlands, for instance, this requirement is not explicit in law but is nonetheless strictly adhered to in practice, and some applicants go to great lengths to obtain a passport, including traveling multiple times to their country of origin. The most unfortunate applicants end up in legal limbo, unable to obtain a foreign travel document but still required by Dutch authorities to show one. A wry detail is that the applicants who fulfil this requirement must, as a general rule, submit proof of relinquishing their old passport, as the Netherlands is one of the few European countries that still restricts dual citizenship.

In this way, passports also enable states to exert control on emigrants. In 2023, Belarus’s authoritarian government stopped issuing passports at embassies and consulates abroad, meaning Belarusian citizens had to return to Belarus to obtain a new travel document. Many Belarusian emigrants ended up in limbo, unable to return for fear of persecution but also unable to legally reside abroad without valid documents. Poland, which has a sizeable Belarusian population, responded by making all Belarusian citizens eligible for a Polish “alien’s passport” (which was previously only granted under exceptional circumstances on a case-by-case basis). This enabled Belarusians to continue having a Polish residence permit and travel internationally—in some cases even without a visa (albeit to far fewer destinations than holders of an ordinary Polish passport).

The complex laws governing passports and international movement also create opportunities to avoid rigid citizenship-based mobility restrictions. For example, Turkish citizens holding an ordinary Turkish passport who want to enter Europe’s Schengen Area are required to obtain a visa. However, Turkey also issues other types of passports, including the green special passport, which was initially reserved for government officials but has gradually become available to members of other elite groups, including lawyers registered with a Turkish bar association for at least 15 years and directors of major exporting companies. As the Schengen Agreement allows Member States to independently enact visa waiver agreements for holders of diplomatic, official, and special passports, holders of a Turkish special passport can enter numerous Schengen Member States without a visa. 

To conclude, passports are more than just a material embodiment of one’s citizenship. They are commonly associated with individual liberty and movement—or the deprivation thereof, depending on the passport. The history of the passport and its international legal framework shows that the documents can be effectively used to curtail movement. This especially concerns individuals one of the authors has described as “victims of citizenship,” who tend to come from the Global South and former colonies, where the quantity of rights associated with citizenship is negligible, turning their citizenship into a clot of liabilities rather than a bundle of rights. Passports are meant for more than a quick document check at the border; they remain relevant throughout the international travel or migration journey—even for the process of naturalization and thereby acquiring a claim to another passport. At the same time, the legal framework governing passports creates opportunities for states and individual migrants to overcome stringent hurdles for international mobility. Far from simply bureaucratic paperwork, these little booklets have become an emblem of the individual’s relationship with their government and, indeed, with those worldwide.

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