“Why do you wall yourself in?” This article, recently published by Damien Simonneau, lecturer in political science at Inalco and researcher at the Institute of Convergent Migration of the Collège de France, continues a reflection initiated a few years ago on the construction of more or less complex walls by States, on their borders, in conflict areas and even on their own territory. This phenomenon, which is constantly growing on all continents, cannot be reduced to the purely physical dimension of the wall, which is a barrier against external threats. It is the result of political preferences specific to those who want to wall themselves in and shows the difficulty of articulating control and circulation today. Here we present you an excerpt from the study.
We live in a walled world where border protection is the norm rather than the exception. Over the past two decades, many states have decided to militarize their borders through what is commonly called a “wall” in French. However, this term is misleading. Behind this common noun we find different forms, called differently by languages and countries: “wall”, “barrier”,
“Fence”, “infrastructure”, “interface” etc. In any case, the name is controversial and starts from the Israeli-Palestinian territory, symbolizing the 21st century walls.to century. For Palestinians, the “jidar al-fasl al-unsuri” or “separation wall” in Arabic is an additional tool of the Israeli military occupation that forces them to pass through checkpoints every day. For Israelis, the “gader ha bitakhon” or “security barrier” in Hebrew offers a reassuring image of their ability to keep out Palestinians who are considered dangerous.
The wall therefore exists both in people’s minds, through the representations we have of it, and concretely and brutally on the ground. Geographers know how to count them, map them, and categorize them according to their cost, their degree of technological sophistication, but also according to the purposes declared in official speeches: here, the delimitation of a ceasefire zone between two armies (Korea, Cyprus, Western Sahara, Georgia, Kashmir), to prevent the intervention of potential combatants (Turkey, Israel, India, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan), or to combat so-called “illegal” immigration (Poland, Hungary, Spain, France, Greece, India) and arms or drug trafficking (United States, China/Burma).
Some walls are in war zones or conflict zones, some are between two states at peace. Some are limited to barbed wire fences (Botswana) or concrete blocks (Jerusalem/Bethlehem), others to the deployment of “virtual” technologies (European Union) or large naval patrols (Australia).
The last few years have been fruitful for walls: Poland is arming its border with Belarus and the Russian enclave Kaliningrad, the Israeli wall is celebrating its twentieth anniversary and expanding off the coast of Gaza in December 2021 before being torn down by Hamas bulldozers. On October 7, 2023, Texas is trying to fill the gaps in its “Trump wall,” especially on the Rio Grande, with floating barbed wire, Turkey is reinforcing its border with Iran, Greece is doubling its wall on its border with Turkey and is planning an “automatic wall,” Modi’s announcement that India wants to wall off its borders with North Macedonia and Albania; Iran also wants to wall off its border with Afghanistan… Geographer Élisabeth Vallet counted 74 walls in 2022, compared to a dozen at the end of the Cold War and the fifth since World War II.
But focusing on the tangible, immediately visible aspect of walls can lead us to forget that they are part of complex security systems, including checkpoints, various technologies, prisons and detention centers, enforcement controls, the laws, procedures and regulations that govern access to a territory, as well as the conversations and political representations that legitimize it. So there is a reason to talk to Évelyne Ritaine about the “politics of the Wall.”
Simultaneously, the common denominator of infrastructures, regulations and practices, contemporary walls, is the function of blocking and controlling human mobility towards a territory, legitimized by a discourse of political separation. Almost everywhere, they originate from unilateral decisions and reveal the tensions of our world in all their asymmetries.
Mechanically, the policy of the wall transforms borders into a barrier. But this vision is too simple and insufficient to understand how they work. The phenomenon of the wall allows us to question the form and function of borders in our globalizing world in new ways. When we think of a border, a common image immediately comes to mind: a map of the world divided into contiguous clusters of different colors and hung in a classroom or a child’s bedroom. From this image emerges a concise definition: a border will be a stable geographical line that organizes the world around States, which are equal and sovereign political entities. A border connects one state to another and draws its boundaries.
The state as the dominant political authority originates from 17th-century European modernity.to century. It later spread throughout the world through European colonization. After 1945, decolonization took place primarily within this framework, especially in Asia and Africa. The newly independent states retained the borders they inherited. In 1964, the Organization of African Unity even pledged to respect the principle of inviolability of these borders in order to resolve territorial disputes as peacefully as possible.
But borders are not just “lines in the sand” as they are called when drawing the borders of the Middle East and Africa. The border has a role in the delimitation of territory between States as well as between groups of people. This corresponds to a complex social and political process characterized by a spatial dimension, of course, but also by a symbolic one. In the words of sociologist Georg Simmel, the border is “a sociological phenomenon that takes on a spatial form”. It is present everywhere, even in bodies, in everyday and individual experiences of collective identity, in belonging to political communities, in class, race and gender relations. The maintenance of physical and social borders is at the heart of debates about ways to combat urban segregation, gentrification and even economic inequalities.
According to this definition of borders, which are both material and symbolic, what is important in border politics is not where the line is drawn or even who the separating units are, but its construction, reinforcement, maintenance, transfer or erasure. . Therefore, the border must be understood as a dynamic. Borders do not just close; they close and open at the same time. This is also true for contemporary walls. Since the end of the Cold War, economic and technological development and trade have reduced distances and increased communication and interdependence from one society to another. In the 1990s, some even put forward the idea of a “borderless world” that would be characterized not by relations between States, but primarily by human, commercial, financial and communication “flows”.
In fact, some regions, such as the European Union or North America, have opted for advanced forms of economic integration, tending to erase state borders or provoking debates about their degree of openness and closure. At the same time, states have decided to strengthen their borders by building walls. According to philosopher Wendy Brown, walls reactivate the symbolism of state sovereignty in a world characterized by transnational phenomena. If militarized borders make it possible to reaffirm the idea of an exclusive political community, they also implicitly reveal the weakening of States internationally and their difficulty in regulating globalization.
In other words, states are trying to assert their presence in a globalized world by investing heavily in border marking and militarization. But we should not see this as a mere paradox: walls can emerge in economically integrated areas. The border situation between the United States and Mexico is characteristic in this respect. Since the late 1980s, the United States has been militarizing the country in the name of combating drugs, illegal immigration, and then terrorism. At the same time, in 1994, they signed the NAFTA free trade agreements with Mexico and Canada in the hope of intensifying investment, financial, and commercial exchanges. Sealing the border with a wall makes it possible to act on a material record by regulating the flows of globalization, as well as a symbolic record for the political communities surrounded by the wall.
Therefore, it is difficult to answer the question “Why do states wall themselves?” simply. » Of course, the wall policy is an act of defense, of security, that is, an act of a state establishing sovereignty over its own territory. But these national security policies compete with economic and commercial flows, common cultures on both sides of the border, local political relations, and security measures implemented by other levels of government. The creation of these policies is the result of debates and power struggles over how to filter cross-border movements of people (tourists, migrants, combatants), goods (legal and illegal), digital data and information, capital, and even viruses and diseases. Here are two examples.
Stock Versions
Faced with a surge in the arrival of migrants or asylum seekers at the Mexican border in March 2019, Donald Trump threatened to close the border, with both local business players (in the El Paso border region in Texas) and citizens (the United States Chamber of Commerce) taking public action to challenge this decision that harmed their interests. They succeed in getting the president to withdraw.
The same issue was at the heart of the debates during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020: what kind of mobility control should we choose to stop the pandemic at what territorial scale? If the reflex of the majority is to impose restrictions on movement at national borders, this solution was not recommended by the World Health Organization. The latter insisted on establishing systems for screening, tracing and isolating infected people, as well as respecting individual protective gestures, in order to make restrictions proportionate to the maintenance of essential commercial activities for limited economies. Wall policies should therefore be defined as a series of legal and technical “solutions” aimed primarily at separating people and goods.
This filter is increasingly carried out by state-of-the-art technologies placed at numerous checkpoints, sometimes far from the border, or by the administrative agent behind his computer. The stability of this filter is also a reflection of the struggles among police and military experts, civil servants and political professionals to impose their own security practices and visions of the world.
