Elisabeth VELLET, UQAM & CMR-St Jean, Canada
In a matter of months in late 2021, Poland’s parliament approved the building of barbed-wire fencing along its border with Belarus, the governor of Texas inaugurated sections of 30-foot-tall steel barriers abutting Mexico financed by state and private funds, and Israel completed an underground “iron wall equipped with sensors on the edge of its border with Gaza. Around the same time, Turkey reinforced its stone wall on the Iranian border, while Greece completed a 25-mile wall separating itself from Turkey and made plans to appeal to the European Union for support to add even more sections.
No continent has been spared from the reinforcement of borders and their fortification which has come to define the beginning of the 21st century. At least 98 border walls across the globe are in some stage of planning, among which 70% have effectively been erected , most of them over the last two decades. While the idea of walls between countries is centuries old, the phenomenon has taken on a scale unprecedented in history. In the post cold war years, borders have become gradually more demarcated as well as harder, reinforced, more fortified, and better armored. Indeed, while state sovereignty is being redefined by globalization, leaders have turned to walls as a method of controlling global flows or at least answer domestic audiences concerns. Confronted with an ill-controlled, unevenly shared globalization , which has drifted since the 2008 financial crisis without any counterweight, the wall offers a tangible artifact for political figures to wave at the edge of their state’s territory. This paper addresses the impact of International relations crisis on the very idea and legitimacy of border walling, as emergency measures tend to be sticky, and last longer than expected, fostering a perennial state of emergency at the peripheries.
Mots clés : borders|border walls|state of emergency|globalization|political theatre
A104999EV