Walled States

In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown examines the constant wall building occurring on the borders of many countries.  She basically says that while these walls are going up, they are decreasing the power of nation states.  My first thought was how interesting it is that so many walls were/are going up during a time when globalization is increasing.  In my mind, globalization in its purest form is supposed to be about broadening borders mostly through trade and migration (including all the exploitative tendencies that come along with that).  So, the borders do not exactly make sense from that simple standpoint.  What Brown has helped me realize is all the tensions and contradictions that connect globalization and wall-building (8, 20, 94).  So, in some ways increased globalization has generated the “need” for these walls to begin with.

Her idea of the walls themselves adding to the destruction of a nation’s sovereignty is interesting.  She speaks about how in most cases the walls are said to be built in order to stop some kind of perceived illegal activity, whether drugs, violence, etc.  Yet, these walls produce even more illegal activity.  According to Brown, the “walls codify the conflicts to which they respond as permanent and unwinnable…and further weakens the link between the state and sovereignty” (84).  This makes me think about narratives, in particular danger narratives.  In the U.S. we have created these danger narratives about “outsiders” trying to get in and how dangerous they are.  This connects with the narrative created about refugees in Grewal’s Transnational America, especially the Sikh women and how the U.S. classifies terrorism, and the issues this created for these women.  In both instances, some kind of barrier went up.  On the U.S./Mexico border, a wall was constructed, and for these refugee women, barriers went up that made it more difficult to obtain asylum.

The next step in this examination for me would give a closer look into the construction of different walls.  It is clear that the barrier on the Saudi border with Yemen (16) is much different from the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border (10), which in turn differs greatly from the India-Pakistan border fence (15), none of which seems as complex as the Saudi Arabia/Iraq border being built at the time of publication (17).  I wonder what these nations claim to be keeping out, and how that translated into a particular construction.