by Feroze Shah, Zaria Smalls, Maia Woluchem

A passport is a tangible, internationally accepted, physical document that serves multiple purposes for legal citizens of a ‘national entity’. Formally, it serves to provide identification, prove citizenship, enable access to state services and allow physical travel between recognized states. In order to function, it relies on an international regime of standardization and mutual recognition. The resulting processes that denote entry and exit from each port allow this physical document to also act as a tangible record of ones travel across state boundaries.

To obtain this document, one must petition their national entity and pay an associated cost. The national entity thus has exclusive power and authority to to enable or restrict access to all the privileges and rights a passport provides. This access is also not permanent. The document has an expiration date and a limited number of pages, which once exhausted, will result in the loss of all of its value. Additionally, the passport remains the property of one’s national entity even when physically with the user; it can unilaterally be revoked or cancelled at any time.

In some cases this physical document has different forms (e.g. Passport Cards in the US); however, not all forms give the same amount of access to privileges. Finally, depending on the issuing nation, some passports are more powerful as a symbol and provide more privileges and freedoms than others.

We began by trying to imagine what it meant for a world to have an Anarchist regime. We quickly settled on two distinct ways of thinking about this. The first was a world in which all countries were Anarchist. But a natural consequence of this line of thinking was that in a world in which no recognized central authorities existing, national borders were unlikely to function and the material justification of passports would largely be unnecessary. The second, more challenging, approach was to consider a world in which a state unilaterally declares itself to be Anarchist, but still functions within a larger world with other conventional nations. Most of our discussion ended up being focussed on this approach.

Our definition of an Anarchist state in this hypothetical was one in which no central authority akin to a government existed. Citizens self-organized to provide services to each other privately and laws were substituted by a norms and iterative expectations of self-interest. “Citizenship” did not have any meaning beyond being a resident of the same geographic vicinity as others. Where you were born or how you got there was not relevant, if you were present you were afforded all the “freedoms” as all other residents. Borders were not enforced, and were imposed by surrounding countries. As a result in-bound immigration was not restricted, and the requirements for outbound travel were entirely at the mercy of the destination country.

We then turned to a process of identifying the essential functions of a passport that now needed  to be substituted to be made to work in this setting, and to challenge assumptions of which of those functions would even be needed or relevant. Our fundamental challenge was that a passport in its present form, represents the very symbols of central power, authority and subservience of the “citizen” that Anarchy directly opposes. In the case of most internal requirements, such as identification and access to state services, the lack of a government or central authority made most of them redundant in the conventional sense. As there was no central guarantor of identity, most trust-based transactions would be dependent on personal relationships or informal, private networks of trust that would vary based on the use case.

The major problem to be solved was regarding how to manage the functions related to international travel. The passport serves as a de facto endorsement of a state. It can prove an individual’s origin and level of risk, and define the potential diplomatic consequences of how they are treated.  From our perspective, there was no “state” that could provide this endorsement by design so we would need to find alternatives that would placate the demands of other states to allow entry. We spent the majority of our discussion debating aspects of how this could work in a relatively realistic and feasible way. Although we did not have complete agreement on all aspects, we attempted to model the process of two already accepted aspects of the international travel regime; visa applications and enforced statelessness (which includes refugees and forced migrants).

We felt the fundamental concern from a “destination” country would be to meet the current standards of establishing trust, financial viability and risk assessment. As there was no central authority we believed that this would have to be maintained unilaterally by any “citizen” of the Anarchist state that wished to travel. This would effectively include a maintaining a running collection of private documents and endorsements (such as bank statements and pictorial proof of residence and familial linkages) that could then be provided over to any country that they wished to travel to. Social media history could also be used a proxy for a lot of the functions that are currently dependent on “official” documentation. In many cases the most stringent vetting processes (especially for those individuals that do not have official documentation such as refugees) already ask for the same measures of proof.

In working through this exercise, it became incredibly apparent that this solution begs a deeper understanding of the ecosystem in which this intervention lies. In our case, though an entirely Anarchist world with no need for passports would have been the easiest fix, the natural world has few analogs for this kind of universal understanding of any type of political or social schema. By focusing on our hypothetical Anarchist state, this exercise highlights the difficulty of any intervention interacting with a bigger, more complex world, with a different set of norms than our own. In the twenty minutes we used to complete this exercise, we dove deep into that difficulty, and came up a bit short in achieving a one-size-fits-all solution. But in doing so, we also got to experience both the pain and triumph of attempting an intervention of this scale in any reality, in our case an entirely stateless one.