Andrea Székely (p)

Tamara Kerzhner

See extended abstract

Vijay Pandey (p)

Andrea Székely

We live in a world of borders and walls. In the 23 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 27 new walls and fences have gone up on political borders around the world. These walls are built by both totalitarian 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 result of internal reasoning, from establishing sovereignty over ungoverned or unruly lands, to protecting internal wealth, to preserving cultural practices from the influence of other value systems. The decision to build the 664-mile barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border, although often presented as primarily in response to drug-related violence and terrorism, is largely due to these internal factors. Borders constitute the international system of states. Accordingly, states will, from time to time, take assertive measures to secure the border, with among the most aggressive strategies being the construction of physical barriers, which we refer to as “border walls”. Using original data on man-made border wall construction from 1800 to 2013, we theorize and find that in many cases wall construction is about economic-security. Significant economic disparities between the states will create incentives to illegally transport people or move goods readily available in the poorer country but highly regulated in the richer country.
We find that economic disparities have a substantial and significant impact on the presence of a physical wall that is independent of formal border disputes and concerns over instability from civil wars in neighbors. We employ the case studies (On the basis of empirical studies) of the Apartheid Wall in Israel-Palestine and the US-Mexico border security wall to inform my analysis, giving particular attention to the engagement of border security walls in processes of racialization.

Tamara Kerzhner (p), Murad Natesh, Sigal Kaplan, Emily Silverman

Vijay Pandey

See extended abstract