Freedom of movement is a human right so basic that it hardly warrants appreciation.
This hasn’t always been the case. The first Homo sapiens who walked out of Africa in the Stone Age were stymied by obstacles as varied as oceans, glaciers, famines and, possibly, even by competing species of hominids. Today serious constraints on movement persist, but they’re often artificial: borders, visas, checkpoints, passports, restricted zones, police.
The Out of Eden Walk team is recording every police stop on my global walking route to illustrate, in an anecdotal way, the mutability of freedom of movement across the planet. All the stops are geotagged with a GPS point and are dated and briefly described when you click on the icons.
Not surprisingly, walking in our highly motorized world tends to draw the attention of security forces. How those officers react to a stranger rambling through the landscape on foot can hint at the stability, openness, and self-confidence of their society at that point in time.
Almost five years into the journey, and up to the Tajik-Afghan border, I have been detained by uniformed police, plainclothes agents, and military personnel 84 times. The national tallies range from zero police stops in Kazakhstan, where the terrain was mostly uninhabited steppe, to 34 stops in Uzbekistan, one of the more authoritarian regimes in Central Asia. In Ethiopia police impounded my camels. Saudi Arabia kept the project under loose but constant surveillance all the time. And in Turkey, officers stopped me on 17 occasions—a testament to worsening violence in the Kurdish region.
“Please do us a favor,” said an intelligence agent in Jaslik, Uzbekistan, after calling me into his office for an interrogation. “Please keep walking. There are 16 different police agencies in this town. All we do is report on each other. You are creating a distraction.”
Our police stops map is not perfect.
If security organs call a walking guide’s mobile phone a dozen or more times a day to check on his location, is that an official “police stop?” I also recognize that unlike war refugees or migrant laborers, I am a privileged traveler, backed by documents and institutions.
This map of global encounters with police hopes to chart subtle meanings: In an era when more people than ever are on the move, often involuntarily, where we stop and why become key elements of the human journey.
