

Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Community
Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts
Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users
Free resources
Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors
The reasons behind the construction of border walls and fences around the world, focusing on cases in the us, india, israel, and other countries. The article discusses the internal politics driving the decision to build these barriers, including establishing sovereignty, protecting wealth and cultural practices, and addressing wealth disparities and fear of population change.
Typology: Essays (university)
1 / 3
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
70 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS VOL. 45, NO. 3
E LIvE A wORLd Of bORdERS ANd wALLS. In addition to the massive and expensive barrier on long stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, in the 23 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 26 other new walls and fences have gone up on political bor- ders around the world. These walls are built by both totali- tarian regimes and democracies, including India, Thailand, Israel, South Africa, and the European Union. Invariably, the barriers are justified in the language of security—the country must be protected from the terrorists, drug cartels, insurgents, or suicide bombers lurking on the other side. Despite the external focus of these justifications, in most instances these walls and fences are actually the re- sult of the internal politics of the state that builds them. There are three specific reasons for constructing a border wall: establishing sovereignty over ungoverned or unruly lands; protecting the wealth of the state and population; and protecting cultural practices within the state from the possible influence of other value systems possessed by immigrants. The decision to build the 664-mile bar- rier along the U.S.-Mexico border, although often pre- sented as primarily in response to drug-related violence and terrorism, is largely due to these internal factors.
HE dESIRE TO ESTAbLISH CLEAR SOvEREIgN authority over the state’s territory is the first fac- tor that underlies the construction of a border barrier. Although we often imagine the territorial outline of countries as sharply drawn lines where the control of one state ends and another begins, most borders on the ground belie this simplicity. The idea that borders (or riv- ers or coastlines) are lines is a convenience of cartogra- phy that is established on the ground many years after a map is drawn, if at all. The oldest political borders in Eu- rope, for example, are only a few hundred years old, and most were established more recently than that. Before the
1600s, most states did not recognize each other’s sov- ereign authority over a territory, and the technological advances in cartography that allowed fixed borders and territories to be represented had not been achieved. Con- sequently, even the simple idea that states have clearly defined territories that are marked by a linear border is a very recent development. The contemporary U.S.-Mexico border was established on maps at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.^1 The war settled which territories the expansion-minded United States could claim and transferred almost half of Mexico’s territory to the United States. The last sections of the border were finalized with the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, which secured mining rights and a better route for a railroad connection to Cali- fornia. At the time, the territory was part of the United States in name only and, despite the enormous land area, was populated by about 100,000 Mexicans and 200, Native Americans.^2 Over the intervening years, sovereign authority over these lands was established by moving Anglo populations onto the land and by violently sup- pressing any resistance. Land surveying, creating prop- erty maps, and the deployment of police forces resigni- fied the landscape. Yet the line existed on the map and in the population’s geographic imagination only inchoately, as the practices and performances of sovereignty slowly inscribed the different territories onto the landscape. This process accelerated in the 1990s as funding for border security increased substantially and the idea of marking the imagined line with a physical barrier took hold. When the Border Patrol was established in 1924, it was tiny and remained underfunded for decades. In 1992, there were 3,555 agents at the U.S.-Mexico border, but by 2010 there were over 20,100.^3 These changes have both practical and symbolic effects on the hardening of the bor- der. The additional agents play a practical enforcement role while the fence project, which passed Congress in 2006, is much more symbolically significant. Walls and fences are the most efficient way to mark territorial differences on the ground because they take the abstract idea of a ter- ritory and materialize it. The construction of the barrier is another step in the process of reimaging these formerly
BoRdeR WaRs
Reece Jones is Associate Professor and Chair of Graduate Studies in the Department of Geography at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Parts of this article are excerpted from his new book, Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (Zed Books, 2012).
FALL 2012 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 71
Native American and Mexican lands as firmly part of the territory of the United States. By physically inscrib- ing the line in the landscape, the wall brings the border into being and visu- ally demonstrates where U.S. territory ends and Mexican territory begins.
The second internal factor that re- sults in the construction of a wall or fence on a border is the presence of a poorer country on the other side. In previous eras, political borders served primarily as either military defensive lines where one army pre-
vented the movement of another or as markers of different government regimes where one set of laws and taxes or one cultural system stopped and another began. Over the 20th century, the practice of absolute sov- ereignty over a bounded territory
Barriers initiated or substantially reinforced since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Start dates indicate the beginning of substantial construction. In the United States, for example, short sections were fenced beginning in the mid-1990s, but the main project began in 2006.
Year Started Initiating Country On Border With
1998 Spain (Melilla) Morocco 1999 Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan 2000 Israel Lebanon 2000 Egypt Gaza 2001 Spain (Cueta) Morocco 2001 Uzbekistan Afghanistan 2001 Turkmenistan Uzbekistan 2002 India Bangladesh 2002 Israel West Bank 2003 China North Korea 2003 Botswana Zimbabwe 2003 India Pakistan 2003 Saudi Arabia Yemen 2004 India Burma 2004 Thailand Malaysia 2004 Kuwait Iraq 2005 Brunei Malaysia 2005 United Arab Emirates Oman 2006 United States Mexico 2006 Kazakhstan Uzbekistan 2006 Saudi Arabia Iraq 2007 Pakistan Afghanistan 2007 Iran Pakistan 2009 Burma Bangladesh 2010 Israel Egypt 2010 Iraq Syria 2011 Greece Turkey 2011 Azerbaijan Armenia
Members of the Utah National guard construct a 1,000-foot extension of the U.S.-Mexico border wall in San Luis, Arizona, on June 7, 2006. Jeff ToppIng / ReUTeRS