Fence Nationalism: Rising Border Walls in the Age of the Drone

• In Event: 2384 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 08. Enforcement and Securitization

Abstract

There are more than 56 national border walls and fences that are newly proposed, under construction, or finished since 2001. The simultaneous return of national border walls and the emergence drones illustrates and helps orient us to the new contours of “vertical sovereignty,” a formation where the nation-state can overcome territorial limits in its dealings with terrestrial human citizens and subjects. I am attentive to the ways that these global shifts have deep roots in the realms of U.S. planetary frontierism, a kind of neo-imperial power that blurs war-making and governance in organizing the shifting terrains of global capitalism. Nomos is a useful and interesting conceptual injunction in uncovering how walls and fences have been historically deployed as a cultural practice of power to organize proscriptions around life, labor, and ownership to carve out new realms of acquisition at the limits of existing formations of state sovereignty. These structures were foundational for emergent nationalisms because they formalized and operationalized racism, racial hierarchy, and difference inside spatial, violent, and visual manifestations of economic and political rule. In recognizing these persisting colonial ecologies embedded in the social, cultural, and political functions of border walls today, we are better equipped to understand how this latest set of walls mark the rebirth of nationalisms, and also to begin to move beyond some of the newest civilizational registers that try to explain how borders and walls enact or produce difference.

Author

• Olivia Mena, University of Texas-Austin