In a sense, physical walls only exist in continuity with the walls in our minds – perhaps in a dialectic relationship with them. The Great Wall of China, the Korean demilitarised zone or the Iron Curtain have profoundly shaped our collective memories. But despite all their materiality, walls are also, above all, mental constructions. mere berms or fences) to the seemingly impermeable (e.g., multiple ranges of concrete walls equipped with tunnel and movement detectors, drones, night-vision equipment, floodlights and robots). Walls are physical, material objects with a visual identity and a life of their own.They range from the porous (e.g. Walls, finally, put human rights out of reach of those who need them most. They hamper the circulation of fauna, flora and water flows. Walls force migrants to pursue more dangerous and costly routes or prevent them from returning to their home country. They produce envy about what may be found on the other side. Walls unleash new forms of – frequently lethal – violence. They reinforce the fault line between the privileged on the one hand and the marginalised and the undesirables on the other. They divide, segregate, reify and exclude. Nation-states, finally, built military fortifications such as the French Maginot Line in an effort to buttress their “natural” frontiers.Īs constitutive as they are for humans, walls entail a host of pernicious effects. Medieval cities, like their antique forebears, walled themselves in behind massive bulwarks for protection.
Empires used walls as civilisational markers and to regulate commercial flows. Since the Neolithic, walls have been integral to the major modes of human political organisation, most notably as defensive structures. outgroup (hostility) has been, for better or worse, structuring human communities since the dawn of mankind.ĭespite the early cosmopolitan utopias of the Greek and Roman Stoics, walls are omnipresent in, and perhaps constitutive of, human history. Sociologically, walls and fences have proven crucial as material and symbolic sites of inclusion and exclusion*. Economically, enclosures fostered the Industrial Revolution.
Our language and cognition are delimited by semantic walls and conceptual containers. Our cells have walls and our bodies an epidermal envelope separating us from the outside world.
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