1. Geopolitical backdrop
The 2026 mobility year unfolded against the consolidation of three durable trends: the digitisation of border management in the Global North; the recovery of inbound tourism in East Asia, accompanied by selective Chinese visa liberalisation; and the continued political-economic reordering of mobility relationships among middle powers.
The war in Ukraine, now in its fifth year, continues to shape Europe–Russia visa relationships. Building on the 2022 suspension of the EU–Russia Visa Facilitation Agreement, the European Commission (2025) tightened access further on 7 November 2025, ending multiple-entry Schengen visas for Russian nationals resident in Russia (who must now obtain a single-entry visa for each trip) across all 29 Schengen states.
The expansion of the Schengen Area on 1 January 2025, when Bulgaria and Romania were admitted as full members after the lifting of internal land border checks, enlarged the European visa-free travel zone to 29 states and approximately 450 million people. The accession of these two countries, which had met technical criteria since 2011, was politically delayed for fourteen years before final ratification, itself an illustration of how mobility liberalisation, even within the EU, depends on factors well beyond technical readiness.
The Kenya policy of universal visa-free entry, expanded in July 2025 to cover all African Union states except Libya and Somalia, marks one of the most significant unilateral liberalisations of the past decade and has become a regional reference point (The East African, 2025). However, Kenyans still face visa requirements across much of the continent, so reciprocity does not fully follow.
2. Updated visa-policy landscape
The 2024–2026 cycle was defined less by movement in the rankings than by a divergence in how borders are administered. Across the Global North, the wealthy democracies converged on pre-travel digital authorization; across much of Asia, and in selected cases elsewhere, the direction of travel was the opposite.
The United Kingdom Electronic Travel Authorisation, applicable to all visa-exempt nationalities, became mandatory for non-Europeans on 8 January 2025 and for European travellers ;on 2 April 2025; from 25 February 2026, the requirement is enforced without discretion.
The European Union began phased implementation of its Entry/Exit System on 12 October 2025 and reached full operation on 10 April 2026, replacing manual passport stamping with biometric registration for all non-EU short-stay visitors. ETIAS, the European pre-travel authorisation, is now expected to launch in the last quarter of 2026 with a six-month transitional period during which travel without authorisation will still be possible. Together with the long-established United States ESTA, Canadian eTA, Australian ETA, and New Zealand NZeTA, the 2026 regime represents a near-total convergence of wealthy democracies on the digital pre-screening model.
The Asian picture is markedly more open. China’s unilateral visa-free programme, introduced in late 2023 to revive post-pandemic inbound tourism, expanded through 2024 and 2025 to cover 48 countries by February 2026. The list now includes most European Union members, the United Kingdom (added 17 February 2026), Canada (added 17 February 2026), Japan (reinstated 30 November 2024), Russia (added 15 September 2025, with a one-year limit), Brazil and the southern South American Mercosur states, the Republic of Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Gulf monarchies. The notable absence from the list is the United States, which remains subject to the standard L-visa requirement for tourism. The 240-hour visa-free transit policy, expanded to 60 ports, across 24 provinces, in 2024, provides the principal short-stay route into China for American travellers.
Brazil reinstated visa requirements for citizens of the United States, Canada, and Australia on 10 April 2025, ending a unilateral waiver in place since 2019, and fully activated its electronic visa platform on 5 February 2026. The Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs cited reciprocity with United States visa requirements for Brazilian nationals as the explicit policy rationale, in line with the long-standing diplomatic principle that visa policy is bilateral.
Kenya’s mobility liberalisation continued through 2025. Following the abolition of all visas on 1 January 2024 and their replacement with an Electronic Travel Authorisation, the government further expanded exemptions on 14 July 2025 to grant outright visa-free entry of up to 90 days to nationals of all African states except Libya and Somalia, plus most Caribbean nations. The country’s destination-openness score of 0.915 (the highest in Africa and eight-highest globally) reflects this strategic decision to use mobility as a tool of regional economic diplomacy.
The 2025–2026 cycle ultimately illustrates that visa policy has ceased to be a purely administrative function and has become an explicit instrument of statecraft. The wealthy democracies have largely resolved their border management question through technology, replacing the visa with the pre-travel authorisation and the passport stamp with the biometric record, converging on a model that maintains the appearance of openness while deepening state visibility over who moves. Elsewhere, the period’s most consequential shifts, China’s selective liberalisation, Kenya’s pan-African gesture, Brazil’s reciprocity reset, were each driven not by administrative logic but by deliberate political calculation: the recovery of inbound tourism, the projection of regional leadership, and the assertion of diplomatic parity. The gap between these two approaches is widening, and the implication for global mobility is significant: where you hold a passport increasingly determines not just whether you need a visa, but which philosophy of border management you will encounter when you travel.
References
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