The Case for World Passports—You Want One. But How?
Because what defines planetary citizenship if not an identity document that facilitates mobility and human rights.
Dear Readers. The research on world passports has taken off, and I’m bringing you two consecutive pieces on this. Today’s digs deep if you’re up for it, with historical roots, legal frameworks, poetry, tech innovation, and most certainly a vision. And it so happens to be International Day of Conscience. A second piece will follow soon, open to everyone, commemorating another special day and extraordinary persons.
I begin writing this in the most apt of places—on the train to Warsaw, one of several trips to the Canadian embassy to renew my passport. An expensive, time-consuming endeavor that’s a solid pain in the assets. But I’m spoiled to even say that as a holder of not one but two such coveted passe-ports, described as “a highly sought after commodity, like real estate and fine art.”
I did nothing to deserve this ‘status.’ I wasn’t born into passport privilege. In fact, back in the day, passports in Poland were a tool for controlling who went and stayed in a country under tight communist rule. The scheming my parents had to do in the 80s to get us passports and leave the country—well, let’s just say it was creative. My family’s defiance of restrictions and our asylum-seeking migration puts my current whining to shame.
But never mind me. The entire world is divided by a reality where nationality determines one’s ability to move freely and access the most basic rights. This inequality has been aptly termed ‘passport apartheid’ that disproportionately affects people from the Global South, stateless peoples like Palestinians, and those displaced by climate change. Meanwhile, powerful nations grant their citizens visa-free access to hundreds of countries, while golden passports and visas now exist for the mega-rich, sold as ‘global citizenship.’
And here’s your daily overdose of Trump: He’s all about the US ‘gold card,’ for wealthy “world-class global citizens” in contrast to the piffling green card and, of course, his push to amend birthright citizenship to ban it for poor foreigners. On the one end, extending prized US citizenship to anyone for five million bucks; on the other, denying this basic constitutional right of nationality and protection—to newborns. Let’s not forget that people who can afford a gold card were most likely born into wealth, while those targeted by the birthright ban are among the world’s most deprived.
The other night, I was at a group dinner and mentioned in a side conversation that I was writing about world passports. My dinner mate’s eyes lit up, and he said, “Oooh, I want one.” Funny you say that I told him; that’s in the essay’s title. Of course, you want one, but why? The freedom? The unbounded mobility? The global identity? The recognition that you will be or should be protected anywhere that you go? The status of having acquired it somehow—but how exactly? Because you were born? Because you deserve it? Because you could afford it? Because you earned it? Because it is your right?
Yeah, I think it is your right. And I’ll tell you how you can have it. But I’m especially interested in world passports for people who should have them because humanity has failed them by taking away their freedoms, mobility, identity, and protection. They deserve it, they earned it, they need it, they were born with dignity and rights, and it is our duty to give them it.
The truth is that current international mobility governance is becoming outdated, and our technological and cognitive advancements make it prime for a revamp. With that sentiment, I think world passports—the ones that already exist and those that are yet to become—should be all the rage as we advance our human evolution.
In what follows, I’ll make the case by examining some of that evolution—from ancient letters of safe passage to today’s passport apartheid, from experimental world passports and legal deficits to emerging innovations and technological pathways—and why this may be the recipe for peace. Then, I’ll teleport us to the not-so-distant future, where world passports empowered by ethical AI build new global mobility for citizens of the Earth.
A Very Brief History: To Pass A Port
The earliest versions of passports were simply letters of safe conduct issued by rulers or religious leaders. The Bible’s Book of Nehemiah is often cited as the earliest reference to such a travel document. As Nehemiah, a Jewish official serving the court of the Persian empire, prepares to journey from the Persian capital to Jerusalem to rebuild the city’s walls, he asks King Artaxerxes for letters to the governors of the Trans-Euphrates provinces he must pass through “so that they will provide me safe-conduct until I arrive in Judah” (Nehemiah 2:7). The king grants his request, offering him political protection to move through imperial territory.
The geographical locations in this passage—the Trans-Euphrates and the forests of the Levant—correspond to today’s embattled lands: Palestine, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. To me, Nehemiah’s story symbolizes the human longing for return, repair, and safe passage. In our time, as Palestinians are denied that very right (we shall discuss this further…), Nehemiah’s story calls for a spiritual and political reckoning with the meaning of home, movement, identity, security, and shared protection.
During ancient and medieval times, borders were fluid, political authority was localized, and informal networks governed mobility.
Passports' function shifted with the rise of the modern nation-state system in the 17th century, particularly after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which essentially established the current international order. As states centralized power and defined territorial boundaries, travel documents became tools for controlling conscription, taxation, and dissent.
Yet even with rising nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, passports were not consistently enforced. Across Europe, industrialization and railways made cross-border movement easier, and liberal ideologies promoted freer travel. Many European countries even abolished passport controls during this period.
World War I marked a turning point. With greater distrust, governments started using passports as a security requirement, especially to target spies and deserters. After the war, these restrictions were formalized. In 1920, the League of Nations held a conference that led to the standardization of modern passports, complete with photographs and visa stamps.
The League introduced the Nansen passport in 1922, named after Norwegian humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen. The Nansen passport provided stateless refugees with a recognized travel document. It was very specifically for persons displaced by World War I and the Russian Revolution. Accepted by over 50 countries, it allowed holders to travel, work, and seek asylum. Notably, the Nansen passport was recognized by the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933 and laid the foundation for refugee protection, later enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention.
During and after World War II, passports became even more tightly linked to sovereignty and exclusion. At the same time, they were lifelines for escape from war and persecution, as in the case of Jewish refugees. Moreover, statelessness became more prominent as millions of people were displaced by decolonization and lacked recognized documentation. When the Cold War arrived, the passport was already reinforced as a tool of control, with some states requiring exit visas to prevent emigration.
In 1954, Garry Davis, a former bomber pilot turned peace activist, founded the World Service Authority (WSA) and began issuing world passports to promote the ideal of universal freedom of movement. Though largely symbolic, states have occasionally recognized the document. This will be the focus of a subsequent article as it requires a thorough discussion of how it started and where it can go.
The Present-Day Injustice of Passport Apartheid
Today, passports are standardized and serve as gatekeepers and gateways. While some passports enable visa-free access to over 180 countries, others confine their holders to highly restricted travel. As main identity documents, they serve a purpose beyond travel and can also determine whether a person has access to education, the labor markets, and social support if needed.
Passport apartheid refers to parallels to the Pass laws of apartheid-era South Africa. In that system of institutionalized racial segregation, Black South Africans had to carry passbooks to restrict their movement, and failure to produce a passbook often led to arrest. Legal scholar Dimitry Kochenov goes further and refers to “global citizenship apartheid,” arguing that citizenship is an arbitrary, inherited status that maintains a hierarchical world order, privileging some while disadvantaging others, often along racial and economic lines.
This global hierarchy affects not only people with ‘weak passports’ but also those with no passports at all. Stateless persons are denied nationality and international protection and are restricted in mobility, often for generations. Their very existence remains in limbo.
Palestinians represent one of the most extreme cases. Millions are registered as refugees under UNRWA, but unlike refugees covered by UNHCR, they do not receive Convention Travel Documents. They often rely on travel documents from Jordan, Lebanon, or Egypt but are not granted full citizenship rights or equal mobility. Under Israeli occupation, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza face extreme restrictions on movement.
Of the many things that disturbed me during my time in Palestine, crossing into Jerusalem from the West Bank was always upsetting. More so because it felt like I was somehow involved in the discrimination simply by being a foreign passport holder, even though I was there as an educator of human rights. I did not have to get off the bus to show my ID, while Palestinian people from there had to line up outside and be subject to the whims of the Israeli officers.
They did not recognize me in the shadows
That suck away my colour in this Passport
And to them my wound was an exhibit
For a tourist who loves to collect photographs
They did not recognize me,
Ah... Don't leave
The palm of my hand without the sun
Because the trees recognize me
All the songs of the rain recognize me
Don't leave me pale like the moon!
—excerpt from The Passport by Mahmoud Darwish
Then, there are those displaced by the forces of climate collapse. Climate change is already a major driver of migration and, in some cases, leading to statelessness. Island nations such as Tuvalu and Kiribati are facing the possibility of complete submersion due to rising sea levels. This raises questions about the future of entire populations whose nations may physically disappear. At the same time, there is an ongoing quandary about how current international frameworks do not adequately address the needs of climate migrants, who often fall outside the more textbook definition of refugees.
The Case for World Passports
So, what do we do? Let’s say we started by, at the minimum, issuing world passports to stateless persons and those displaced by climate change, i.e., those who were failed by existing systems. The WSA did something like this, and I see no persuasive reason why international institutions with ‘stature’ should not cooperate with such organizations or even just be inspired by them to take similar measures. I’ll explore the work of the WSA in more detail in the next piece, but the principle matters here: if the existing system denies rights, we need new instruments to assert them.
For example, a “climate passport” has been proposed as a modern legal instrument to address the growing number of people compelled to leave their homes due to climate change. Such a passport could be piloted for displaced island nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati. Such a document could help reduce irregular migration and human smuggling by providing legal and dignified pathways for movement, giving safe passage for climate migrants without requiring them to be within the usual system of seeking asylum.
Likewise, multiple states could pilot a world passport for stateless persons to grant access to international protections and break the cycle of statelessness.
Before the shock and horror and oh-we-could-never, know that none of this is radical, not in the least. The Nansen passport provides a historical precedent that a supranational travel document can be recognized globally. Just as the League of Nations established an international mechanism for stateless persons, the UN or regional organizations like the EU or African Union could introduce a globally accepted identity document. Initial adoption by a group of nations could lead to wider recognition. Organizations like UNHCR and IOM could oversee this, some having already had experience issuing documentation and being invested in safe and ‘regular’ migration.
While UNHCR already supports the issuance of Convention Travel Documents to stateless persons under the 1954 Convention on Statelessness, the reality on the ground doesn’t match the promise. Few states actually provide them, and those that do often issue outdated, non-machine-readable documents that fail to meet international standards. Stateless people are thus caught in a double bind: they must rely on the very state systems that deny or marginalize their existence, and even the travel documents meant to empower them are viewed as suspect at borders.
The pilots could be the first steps. Of course, a functioning world passport would require international recognition, with a legal framework and institutional backing. But it’s doable, and with technological innovation, I think it is inevitable.
The Role of Technology and AI
If the main issue that guides passport issuance is ‘security,’ then a world passport system can make the world more secure with technological advancements. The trick is ensuring that new technologies enhance individual rights and freedoms without encroaching on them—a tricky thing indeed.
AI and blockchain-based digital identity systems could advance identity verification and fraud prevention, making a digital world passport secure, accessible, and functional. A decentralized digital identity could allow secure storage and management of one’s credentials without relying on state authority. This has the potential of giving greater autonomy and protection, especially for stateless persons.
Emerging self-sovereign identity (SSI) systems also have a promising ring to them. The promise of these systems is that individuals can own and control their personal data, share it selectively, and receive credentials from multiple trusted sources and not just states.
That said, there’s also the dark side. These promising technological tools carry serious risks we need to be wary of, especially when it comes to the potential targeting of vulnerable populations that the passports would be aimed to protect. As reported by Amnesty International and others, surveillance technologies are being weaponized at borders, biometric data has been collected without adequate consent in refugee settings, and algorithmic bias can replicate racial or national origin discrimination. SSI must also be safeguarded against digital exclusion, tech monopolization, and the temptation to re-centralize power under a new guise.
With a sober eye, we can instill rights-based frameworks to prevent technology from entrenching exclusion instead of dissolving it.
On what appears to be a positive note, several countries are actively piloting digital passport initiatives. Finland and the Netherlands have launched pilot programs for digital passports stored on smartphones and tested on real travel routes for select flights, and this is proposed to go Europe-wide. The UK government plans to make British passports available on smartphones through a digital wallet by 2027, aiming to modernize and streamline government services overall.
All this highlights the growing feasibility of secure, tech-enabled identity solutions on a global scale, provided we proceed with caution and ensure they align with strong ethical frameworks.
A Possible Recipe for Peace
I haven’t yet gotten to intergalactic interplanetary travel, and my teleport abilities are still being fine-tuned. But you get the picture as to where the evolution is heading. In my eyes, nothing ‘worldly’ has legitimacy if it is only available for the mega-rich and those entrenched in systems that repeatedly fail the rest of humanity, a helluva lot of people. That’s not the direction that we’re going. A global society that cannot take care of and serve the most vulnerable but, worse, actively permits exploitation and degradation of entire populations does not deserve anything ‘golden.’
Passports will continue to evolve. They hold our identities, give or deny our rights and freedoms, categorize us, enrich or impoverish us, grant or withhold possibilities, and tell our stories. That birthright to tell and live our stories in freedom, fairness, and equality will shape the future of peace in our world. I bet on it. More than that, I want to make it a reality, and you can too.