The entropy of order
Walls are designed as a rampart against perceived security problems, with no clear evidence of their actual effectiveness (Filipec and Mackova, 2019). While their legitimacy lies in the restoration of an ancient order, border walls produce entropy: Walling is “a perverted matrix that transforms meaningful order into an illegitimate, rigid structure” (Horvath, 2019: 31). In those interstitial spaces (Newman, 2003: 19), wall building is linked to a "lasting violence, even a state of war” (Agier, 2016), which can take the form of economic, social but also environmental violence (Vallet, 2017).
The resulting tension leads to a crescendo of violence fed, in a way, by the state sedentary bias - where "mobility is perceived as a danger” (Chebel D'appollinia, 2012). Hence, the feudalization of the border (see Gasparini, 2017: 68-69) submits borderlands to both a centrifugal and a centripetal effect.
First the centrifugal effect of the frontier relegates border spaces to the margins of the territory but also to the confines of the rule of law, designing borderlands as spaces of exception: “a wall to some extent insulates the state from human rights duties” (Paz, 2017: 603). In that context the addition of a wall “has given rise to some of the most violent communities in the world” (Gasparini. 2017: 18). Then, the centripetal effect of the frontier has transformed borderlands into locus of experimentation, “laboratories”8 where the center weighs more than on the rest of the national territory: "the centripetal effect of [closed] borders [is] the orientation towards the interior of the people inhabiting
State of border walls in globalized world 15 the enclosed territory" (Van Houtum, 1998: 16; see also Vollaard, 2009: 698). In the peripherical space, the national exteriority is being so interiorized that it "provides [the state] citizenry with evidence of the protective power of the state and simultaneously grounds [...] that state’s demands to increase its power over [...] that citizenry" (Bowman, 2019: 79). It also reveals “an alarming concentration of power cloaked in the language of security” (Walker, 2018b). In that context, walls act as “colonial tools” (Stumer, 2019: 3) that carry a disproportionate impact on a marginalized population (Wilson, 2010) through “their relationship to mobility" (Pallister Wilkins, 2015: 443) inevitably fueling additional violence (Weber and Pickering, 2011: 133; Camion, 2016). In that regard, border walling and concrete border walls contribute paradoxically to the erosion of sovereignty (Konrad, 2015).
Hence, in recent times, their relevance relies on the fact that they are “visible [and ...] photogenic” (Agier, 2016: 55), a “spectacle” (Garrett, 2018: 191), a “simulacrum" (Baudrillard. 1981; 2006), “a type of public display that demarcates the territory and reflects a deeper and often conflicted ontology of hope and/or fear” (Shirlow and Murtagh, 2004) key to the construction of identities and space (Stephenson and Zanotti, 2013: 3; Brown, 2009: 16). They do not address a substantiated external threat but feed on “a xenophobic identity” they reproduce through alienization (DeChaine, 2009: 61). Recent research has therefore correlated the influence of right-wing parties and the prevalence of an identity discourse that ultimately led to the building of several walls in Europe (Ruiz, 2018).
Hence border walls perform a “theatrical presence” (Minca and Rifke, 2017) for the benefit of an internal audience. To the point where the performance is sometimes limited to the sole announcement of a hypothetic wall - in the last decade, 15 of them have been announced, sometimes even funded but not effectively built.
The spectacle of the wall tends to mask not only “the contestations, controversies, but also cooperation and negotiations between social and state actors in the implementation of border security policies” (Simonneau, 2019: 102). It ends up creating the illusion that the enclosure of the territory is the panacea. However, the sole fact that “walling is growing and prosperous does not supply the positive proof about its necessity” (Horvath, 2019: 30).
So, why build walls? Given that populations are increasingly sensitive to global risks, it is easy to brandish a ready-made solution, which, even if it siphons off public funds, shows that the government is taking action - Trump’s re-election strategy attests to this (Miroff and Dawsey, 2019). In the short term, this mise-en-scene can be electorally effective. But in the longer term, walls are a temporary illusion offering a vain response to a poorly controlled globalization and to the lack of international commitment in solving problems whose dimension extends far beyond state borders. We live “a time where overlaps of mass migration flows, economic meltdown and global environmental crisis fuel authoritarian populist fire” (Turban and Armiero, 2017: 2) but at the same time, those flows will not be forever contained by archaic ramparts.
History has shown that border walls always end up falling ... either physically or symbolically.
