Concrete connections? Articulation, homology and the political geography of boundary walls

Abstract

Scholarly and activist discourses alike have invoked a homology between walling practices along the US/Mexico border and in occupied Palestine. Such discourses often rely on visual/rhetorical manoeuvres to assert equivalence between distinct sites, technologies and practices. Often, this equivalence then enables the collapsing of difference into what we describe as the ‘global security’ paradigm, one that represents a multiplicity of governmental practices, logics and outcomes as manifestations of a singular ‘global’ phenomenon. Although we celebrate the impulse to articulate common struggles against violence or dispossession, we question whether the assertion of singularity or equivalence between sites obscures important differences that might more productively inform a politics of solidarity. We furthermore ask whether viewing ‘securitisation’ as a ubiquitous global phenomenon risks reiterating the very logic by which states rhetorically justify their walling practices. In this paper we explore these issues, and identify a need for further work that takes seriously the heterogeneity of walling projects while examining the translocal practices and articulations that inform their proliferation and construction.