Rethinking border walls as fluid meshworks

Abstract

We tend to see border walls as stable concrete fortifications. This article seeks to offer an alternative understanding of walls by suggesting a shift in border studies from network thinking to meshwork thinking. Despite references to multiplicity, concepts of networks and assemblages in border studies continue to provide neat narratives of walls. This article reimagines the border beyond sovereign–disciplinary–biopolitical networks and assemblages. It argues that border walls are constituted by and constitutive of the ever-shifting transformative movements of lines: colonizing lines, crack lines and lines of flight. By tracing the lines of the Separation Wall in the West Bank, this article reveals that, on the border, all these lines coexist, entangle with one another, and in their entanglements, they alter each other to form a fluid meshwork. Meshwork thinking shows the constant mobility of the border and shifts our attention to the power of molecular movements beneath the state in creating, sustaining and disrupting power politics. By presenting a less state-centric, more complex picture of the Separation Wall, this article aims to highlight the movement of the lines that transform the border into a meshwork.

La contribución de la Sociología Política Internacional al pensamiento crítico en Relaciones Internacionales

“…En este sentido, el problema deja de ser el de cómo reimaginar la comunidad política en un mundo postsoberano, sino el de entender cómo el poder y la autoridad de refundan a través de la producción de nuevos espacios sociales (Lefebvre, 1991;Linklater, 1998). La Sociología Política Internacional toma para si misma el problema legado por el giro crítico y construye a partir de él su programa de investigación, focalizado en el análisis del diseño de fronteras como aquel central para la política y para las relaciones sociales y desarrollado a través de estudios sobre cómo esas fronteras (territoriales, epistemológicas, ontológicas) y límites (culturales, socioeconómicos, jurídicos) son establecidos (Basaran, 2008;du Plessis, 2018;Elden, 2006;Ozguc, 2021;Rajaram y Grundy-Warr, 2007;Rygiel, 2011).…”

Modular sovereignty and infrastructural power: The elusive materiality of international statebuilding

“…Authors have challenged dominant spatial understandings of sovereignty as constituted through enclosures (Brown, 2010: 45) and looked into technologies representing sovereign spaces in the form of maps, policies, surveys and concepts that simultaneously generate, order and hierarchize political spaces (Bilgin, 2004; Gregory, 2004). In this respect, the relation of borders, walls and borderlands to sovereignty has gained renewed attention (Aradau and Blanke, 2010; Brown, 2010; Goettlich, 2018; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Ozguc, 2021; Weizman, 2007).…”

Red-zoning: Spatial logics, the prototype and colour-coded cartographies of insecurity

“…Partially in reaction to such totalizing metaphors, then, another group of scholars has sought to account for the heterogeneity of distinct spatial forms, with spatial security interventions becoming heterotopias (e.g. Ozguc, 2021). While useful for adding complexity, such formulations run the risk of either renouncing and/or implicitly reaffirming the broader historical generalizations grounded in spatial metaphors.…”