Walls are an anthropological constant. They epitomise human finitude. Our cells have walls and our bodies an epidermal envelope separating us from the outside world. Our language and cognition are delimited by semantic walls and conceptual containers. Economically, enclosures fostered the Industrial Revolution. Sociologically, walls and fences have proven crucial as material and symbolic sites of inclusion and exclusion*. The key dyad of ingroup (cohesion) vs. outgroup (hostility) has been, for better or worse, structuring human communities since the dawn of mankind.

Despite the early cosmopolitan utopias of the Greek and Roman Stoics, walls are omnipresent in, and perhaps constitutive of, human history. Since the Neolithic, walls have been integral to the major modes of human political organisation, most notably as defensive structures. Empires used walls as civilisational markers and to regulate commercial flows. Medieval cities, like their antique forebears, walled themselves in behind massive bulwarks for protection. Nation-states, finally, built military fortifications such as the French Maginot Line in an effort to buttress their “natural” frontiers.

The Materiality of Walls

As constitutive as they are for humans, walls entail a host of pernicious effects. They divide, segregate, reify and exclude. They reinforce the fault line between the privileged on the one hand and the marginalised and the undesirables on the other. Walls unleash new forms of – frequently lethal – violence. They produce envy about what may be found on the other side. Walls force migrants to pursue more dangerous and costly routes or prevent them from returning to their home country. They hamper the circulation of fauna, flora and water flows. Walls, finally, put human rights out of reach of those who need them most.

Walls are physical, material objects with a visual identity and a life of their own.They range from the porous (e.g. mere berms or fences) to the seemingly impermeable (e.g., multiple ranges of concrete walls equipped with tunnel and movement detectors, drones, night-vision equipment, floodlights and robots). But despite all their materiality, walls are also, above all, mental constructions. The Great Wall of China, the Korean demilitarised zone or the Iron Curtain have profoundly shaped our collective memories. In a sense, physical walls only exist in continuity with the walls in our minds – perhaps in a dialectic relationship with them. Recently, more immaterial types of walls have been emerging in the digital realm such as “gateways”, “blockchains” or the Great Firewall of China.

The Vanishing Prospect of a Borderless World

In the seemingly “borderless” world of the (post)-modern/global era characterised by endless fluidity walls appear as something of an oddity, a relic of an ancient past. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, so the hope went, smaller walls would fall too. However, in the last two decades the exact opposite took place: around 30 nations have built 43 new barriers along their borders with 31 other countries (see map). “Gated communities”, signalling new forms of social apartheid in urban settings, have been springing up in Brazil, South Africa, Egypt, Iraq and elsewhere. Internationally, the list of most prolific wall-builders includes India, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Turkey and many European countries such as Hungary, Greece and Bulgaria. The United States and its president’s grandiloquent talk of a great and beautiful wall with Mexico further nurture this “International of Walls”.

The Roots of Walls

Walls, today, are usually built for a mixture of reasons combining security – mostly against terrorism — and migratory concerns, with an emphasis on the latter. If one looks at the longue durée, it rapidly appears that while in the past walls were built primarily to keep hostile aggressors at bay, today their main purpose is to keep out migrants and refugees seeking shelter and opportunities for a better life.

Walls therefore firstly reflect the general anxiety in face of intensifying migration and raising global inequality. Cross-border economic inequality now constitutes the most robust predictor of border walls.** Without surprise, in times of crises people shut their doors (and blinds) and revert to truisms such as “the boat is full”. Walls, which are usually built for those on the inside, offer mental comfort. They reassure.

Secondly, the new walls are also the symptom, the very flesh-and-bone manifestation of the rise of right-wing populism with its fears of various types of “contamination”, false certainties and identitarian illusions.

Thirdly, constructing walls is a lucrative business for a well-organised and influential cottage industry. It has been estimated, for instance, that one kilometre of the US-Mexico border costs between USD 1 and 6 million to build and USD 6.5 billion to operate over 20 years.***

Fourthly, the new walls have been attributed to a regained vitality of sovereignty and confidence in the territorial state. Conversely, however, it has also been argued that they constitute a vain and desperate attempt to veil the incapacity of states to address terrorist and other global threats.

The Theatricality of Walls

One of the works of street art painted on what remains of the Berlin wall on the occasion of the 25 years of its fall.

A wide range of political actors have indeed used the symbolic capital of walls to “look tough”, to project myths of origin and ethnic purity, and to mask more prosaic intentions. Walls, in this sense, have become a dramaturgic act – a show where various actors vie for the attention of an ever more ephemeral and fickle public. Beyond the rhetoric, however, it is much less evident that the new walls prove effective. In practice, walls often remain the product of improvisation and makeshift. In the era of airplanes, drones and heavy artillery, walls have lost their military relevance just as they largely fail to keep out terrorists.

Experts are also sceptical about whether walls adequately curb migration as most borders are simply too long and topographically uneven to be patrolled efficiently. All walls remain, ultimately, porous and ephemeral. They can be circumvented, tunnelled, crossed with ladders or ramps, or flown over. Most migrants, nowadays, as is the case in the United States, do not pass through clandestine border crossings but through official points of entry such as airports. From such a perspective, walls mostly divert or canalise flows but do not prevent them from occurring.

The Praxeology of Walls

Whatever their ultimate efficiency, walls – far from simply freezing the status quo – have real impacts. Walls have become a dramaturgic act – a show where various actors vie for the attention of an ever more fickle public They create new borderland ecosystems and trigger strategies of circumvention, appropriation and subversion. They attract economic entrepreneurs such as smugglers, drug couriers, human traffickers and cattle rustlers. They provide employment to border patrols and personnel and give a sense of purpose to the militias professedly defending it. For borderlanders living in the messy reality of “liminal spaces”, walls are lived experiences and part of their identities. Recent scholarship has therefore drawn a more nuanced picture of walls, highlighting their capacity to foster opportunities, to act as catalysts of (ex)change and as vectors for aesthetic transgression such as graffiti.

To conclude, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder once suggested that closure is good in young nations for purposes of identity formation but that mature ones were bound to openness, exchange and dialogue. Even though everything in human life is finite, except, perhaps, the universe, and walls prove to be constitutive of – and necessary to – communal life and social organisation, it remains, after all, the mission of humanity to transcend them.

The present dossier aims to offer a better understanding and fresh perspectives on a series of walls and fences – new and old – between nations.