Building Walls and Dissolving Borders: The Challenges of Alterity, Community and Securitizing Space

Walls play multiple social, political, economic and cultural roles and are linked to the fundamental question of how human beings live together. Globalization and urbanization have created high population density, rapid migration, growing poverty, income inequality and frequent discontent and conflict among heterogeneous populations. The writers in this volume explore how walls are changing in this era, when social “containers” have become porous, proximity has been redefined, circulation has intensified and the state as a way of organizing political life is being questioned. The authors analyze how walls articulate with other social boundaries to address feelings of vulnerability and anxiety and how they embody governmental processes, public and social contestation, fears and notions of identity and alterity. This book’s authors explore walls as the consequence of a changing web of social relationships. Whether walls are physical objects on the landscape or metaphors for difference among specific groups or communities, the writers consider them as heterotopias, powerful sites around which ways of living together are contested and transformed. They also investigate how architectural planning concerning walls may de facto become a means of waging war, as well as how demolishing walls may give way to new ways of imagining security.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction: building walls, unmaking borders: the securitization of space and the making of community imagination, Max O. Stephenson Jr and Laura Zanotti; Part I Walling Spaces, Making Identity: Bordering violence? Natality and alterity in Hannah Arendt’s thought, Alexander D. Barder and François Debrix; Bamboo walls: military dependents’ villages of Taiwan as cultural heterotopias, Tsung Juang Wang; Gates not walls as a securitization strategy: gated communities and market rate co-operatives in New York, Setha Low, Gregory T. Donovan and Jen Jack Gieseking; Tinkering with space: heterotopic walls and the privileged imaginary of the `new Belfast’, Scott Tate. Part II Enclosing a Porous World, Securitizing the Movement of People: Inside-outside: the making of the West Bank security wall, M. Alaa Mandour; Design as defense, broken barriers and the security spectacle at the US-Mexico border, Timothy W. Luke; Peacekeeping power practices and women’s insecurity in Haiti, Marsha Henry and Paul Higate. Part III Walls and the Hybridization of Memory: Reading trails and inscriptions around an old bus-house in Monarga, North Cyprus, Yonca Hurol and Guita Farivarsadri; Cultural memory after the fall of the Berlin Wall: the case of Checkpoint Charlie, Carolyn Loeb and Andreas Luescher. Part IV Conclusions: Conclusions; Index.

About the Author :
Max Stephenson is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for Policy & Governance, Virginia Tech and Laura Zanotti is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, USA. Max O. Stephenson Jr, Laura Zanotti, Alexander D. Barder, Francois Debrix, Tsung Juang Wang, Setha Low, Gregory T. Donovan, Jen Jack Gieseking, Scott Tate, M. Alaa Mandour, Timothy W. Luke, Marsha Henry, Paul Higate, Yonca Hurol, Guita Farivarsadri, Carolyn Loeb, Andreas Luescher.

Review :
'This tough-minded and lucid collection offers a tour of the barriers - both physical and immaterial - that have divided the planet into festering territories of animosity. Investigating sites both familiar and singular, these essays reveal the ironic tenacity of the building of walls in a globalized era in which the production of the very idea of an inside and an outside is radically destabilized.' Michael Sorkin, City University of New York, USA 'The geographies of border construction and the social and state practices of control highlighted in this collection expose xenophobic, often racist, and perhaps also masculinist counter-visions of the wall. Cultural geographers interested in the emotional, political, and spatial characters of these practices would find this a very useful resource. Stephenson Jr. and Zanotti's book is a rich collection in and for contempormy political times.' Journal of Cultural Geography