Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, why are leading democracies like the United States, India, and Israel building massive walls and fences on their borders? Despite predictions of a borderless world through globalization, these three countries alone have built an astonishing total of 5,700 kilometers of security barriers. In this groundbreaking work, Reece Jones analyzes how these controversial border security projects were justified in their respective countries, what consequences these physical barriers have on the lives of those living in these newly securitized spaces, and what long-term effects the hardening of political borders will have in these societies and globally.
Border Walls is a bold, important intervention that demonstrates that the exclusion and violence necessary to secure the borders of the modern state often undermine the very ideals of freedom and democracy the barriers are meant to protect.
Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, why are leading democracies like the United States, India, and Israel building massive walls and fences on their borders? Despite predictions of a borderless world through globalization, these three countries alone have built an astonishing total of 5,700 kilometers of security barriers. In this groundbreaking work, Reece Jones analyzes how these controversial border security projects were justified in their respective countries, what consequences these physical barriers have on the lives of those living in these newly securitized spaces, and what long-term effects the hardening of political borders will have in these societies and globally.
Border Walls is a bold, important intervention that demonstrates that the exclusion and violence necessary to secure the borders of the modern state often undermine the very ideals of freedom and democracy the barriers are meant to protect.
Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel
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Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel
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Overview
Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, why are leading democracies like the United States, India, and Israel building massive walls and fences on their borders? Despite predictions of a borderless world through globalization, these three countries alone have built an astonishing total of 5,700 kilometers of security barriers. In this groundbreaking work, Reece Jones analyzes how these controversial border security projects were justified in their respective countries, what consequences these physical barriers have on the lives of those living in these newly securitized spaces, and what long-term effects the hardening of political borders will have in these societies and globally.
Border Walls is a bold, important intervention that demonstrates that the exclusion and violence necessary to secure the borders of the modern state often undermine the very ideals of freedom and democracy the barriers are meant to protect.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848138261 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 07/12/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Border Walls
Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel
By Reece Jones
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Reece JonesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-826-1
CHAPTER 1
BORDERS, BARRIERS, AND THE WAR ON TERROR
There is something about walls. You know with the whole Vietnam experience, when we were trying to express the whole experience, the lives lost, what did we come up with? A wall. We built this wall [on the US–Mexico border] to express something. There is no question that the wall says something in and of itself. And it depends on which side of the issue you are on as to what you think it says. For someone like myself that tends to look at migration as a phenomenon of the poor – it is so connected to the poor – that wall is almost like a denial of the humanity of the poor. I am not even going to recognize that you are a human being. This wall says that. (Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, El Paso)
Globalization and borders
The physical barriers built by the United States, India, and Israel on their political borders are the largest and most expensive infrastructure projects undertaken in each country in the new millennium (Kabir 2005; Rael 2011; Weizman 2007). All three of these border security projects were under consideration for many years, but had not been completed owing to the high cost, local political resistance, and concerns about the damaging stigma associated with building barriers, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Indeed, as the Cold War ended and the discourse of globalization was ascendant, the idea of building a massive and expensive barrier on a political border seemed anachronistic. The establishment of free trade agreements such as NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and the removal of internal border checkpoints in the European Union (EU) appeared to confirm progress towards a borderless world (Ohmae 1990, 1996).
In the 1990s, there was unease about the cultural, economic, and political changes that might be brought by globalization, but it often focused on the possibility of conflict around the world as traditional ways of life were defended from the spread of 'Western' practices (Barber 1995). The process of globalization did result in international production networks as many companies moved manufacturing jobs out of wealthy countries into other parts of the world. At the same time, many agricultural societies restructured their economies as development was linked to the idea of free trade through the removal of trade barriers at borders (Brunet-Jailly 2011; Sparke 2006). The world's population grew rapidly but unequally during the decade, with much of the increase concentrated in poorer countries, which often resulted in the expansion of urban slums (Davis 2004). At the same time, advances in transportation and communication technologies increased awareness of how other people lived around the world.
By the end of the 1990s, the potential cultural and economic impacts of immigration into wealthier countries from other parts of the world was a significant issue (Heyman 1998). In the United States, the idea of a permanent physical barrier was proposed to slow the flow of immigrants and drugs across the vast southern border with Mexico (Andreas 2009; Nevins 2010). In India, immigration and smuggling were concerns, as was the need to define the boundaries of the still relatively new country (Jones 2009b; Krishna 1994). In Israel, there were ongoing debates about the territorial extent of the state and how to incorporate or exclude the millions of Palestinians that live in the occupied territories (Gordon 2008; Yiftachel 2006). These concerns resulted in more spending on border security in all three countries at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, despite the rhetoric of globalization and a borderless world, the 1990s saw almost as much border fencing globally as the previous four decades of the Cold War combined (Hassner and Wittenberg 2009). In the United States, for example, the number of Border Patrol agents was doubled in the 1990s, new strategies of enforcement were tested, and a few short sections of physical barrier were built (Heyman and Ackelson 2009). Even more aggressive border security projects were proposed but languished unfunded because the political and public will was not yet there to support them.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in the United States, multiple bombings in major cities across India, and the Second Intifada in Israel/Palestine, these projects moved to the front of the queue and were rapidly built in each country. While the causes cannot simply be reduced to terrorism, and the consequences have broader ramifications, these discourses did provide the necessary fear and affect to make border security an immediate priority. This chapter links together the seemingly disparate border security projects in the United States, India, and Israel by arguing that there are broad similarities in how the barriers were justified in each country, in how they affected the local lived experience of the borderlands, and in the long-term consequences they will have in each society and globally.
The global war on terror
This book is about the global war on terror, not terrorism itself. During the past decade, the United States, India, and Israel were attacked by terrorist organizations and the fear felt by people in each country is very real. In the United States, 2,976 people were killed in New York City, Washington, DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on 11 September 2001. In India, the killing of 166 people during the siege of Mumbai in November 2008 received the most extensive international attention, but there were also major bombings in India every year from 2001 to 2008. In Israel, just in the month of March 2002, 142 people were killed in bombings. The purpose of this book is neither to deny these facts nor diminish their significance. These were all horrible acts and are to be condemned in the strongest terms. The focus here, however, is specifically on how these events were understood after the fact. Rather than investigating the causes of terrorism or revisiting the acts themselves, this book is about how the governments and the people of these countries responded to these provocations.
The discourse of the global war on terror differed from previous geopolitical narratives of the Cold War in two critical ways that allowed open borders to be perceived as a security threat. The first shift is the description of the enemy other in the global war on terror as an evil that has no place in the modern world. The idea that the enemy-other is outside the spaces of modernity is substantially different from the earlier rhetoric of the Cold War, which emphasized the containment and prevention of the spread of communism (Campbell 1992). While the Soviet Union was described by Ronald Reagan as an 'evil empire,' it had international legitimacy because it was another sovereign state, a member of the United Nations, and on the UN Security Council. Conflict during the Cold War predominantly occurred when the Soviet Union or the United States attempted to project power beyond their borders. In contrast, in the global war on terror, the enemy is denied legitimacy anywhere in the world (Gregory 2004; Gregory and Pred 2007; Oza 2007a).
This shift in the rhetoric is evident in the speeches the leaders of the United States, India, and Israel gave in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Former US president George W. Bush (2002: 5) argued in a speech on 14 September 2001 that 'Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.' In India, the former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (2001) made a nationally televised speech on 14 September to declare that 'Every Indian has to be a part of this global war on terrorism. We must, and we will, stamp out this evil from our land, and from the world.' Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon (2001a) used similar language on the evening of 11 September when he said, 'The fight against terror is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and our way of life.' In the global war on terror, the rhetoric is no longer about containing the enemy; it anticipates eliminating the enemy from the world.
The second shift is the description of this evil threat as global and no longer constrained by geography. In the Cold War, the dominant geopolitical narratives relied on the metaphors of containment and dominoes. This simplistic but evocative narrative described the countries that surrounded the Soviet Union as having the greatest risk of falling, like dominoes, to communism (Dodds 2003). In the global war on terror, the threat is no longer limited to neighboring areas. Instead, the enemy-other could strike anywhere, at any time, against anyone, as attacks in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States demonstrated. Crucially, the local context of the attack is removed and instead each instance is described as another equivalent example of global terrorism. Therefore, while evil is 'stamped out' elsewhere, it is essential to secure political borders to prevent the enemy-other from entering the secure space of the modern state.
The concern about a globally capable and evil enemy-other abroad exposed feelings of vulnerability at home (Low 2008). As officials in the United States, India, and Israel assessed what steps could be taken to prevent future attacks, each country's long and relatively open borders appeared to be an immense security risk (Brunet-Jailly 2006). An underlying assumption in these discussions was that at some previous point in history most borders had been closed and that the process of globalization resulted in an opening of borders not only to the movement of people and goods but also to these new threats. The opposite is closer to the truth. While there are examples of militarized borders in past eras – for example, the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War – most political borders have never been militarized. Even the simple idea of using mutually agreed-upon borders to divide separate states is a relatively recent development (Murphy 1996).
The changing purpose of borders
The idea of building a wall to keep someone out (or in) is not a new phenomenon. The earliest sections of the Great Wall of China were built over 2,500 years ago with the most recognizable parts constructed over 500 years ago. Hadrian's Wall in northern England was begun by the Roman Empire in AD 122 to define its northern boundary and prevent the movement of raiders. Most medieval cities had walls and fortifications to protect their people and resources in the event of an attack. All of these walls are early examples of political territoriality, which Sack (1986: 19, emphasis in original) defines as 'the attempt by an individual or group to affect influence or control people, phenomena and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographical area.' However, prior to the modern era, there was not a systematic use of bounded territories to signify political claims (Murphy 1996). Instead, through most of human history there were small centers of power, such as the walled cities of the medieval era in Europe, which had absolute control only over nearby lands. Between these centers of power were loosely or un-administered spaces with overlapping and often contentious claims made by multiple kingdoms, city-states, or empires (Scott 2009).
Over the past 300 years, as technological advances in communication and transportation allowed the expansion of state administration, the precise role played by boundaries changed from defensive military lines, to markers of sovereignty, to sites for preventing the movement of undesired people (Rosière and Jones 2012). The oldest purpose of political borders was to mark military defensive lines beyond which one ruler would not allow the army of an opposing ruler to go. A few of these boundaries still remain in the contemporary world – for example, the demilitarized zone on the Korean peninsula or the line of control that separates Indian and Pakistan forces in Kashmir. These types of borders are anomalies where competing territorial claims are not settled and militaries maintain control of the zone that separates the two states.
Most contemporary borders, however, are no longer defensive lines. Rather they are mutually agreed-upon boundaries that separate different sovereignty regimes where one administrative and legal system ends and another begins (Brunet-Jailly 2011; Elden 2009; Murphy 1996). The creation of the United Nations after WWII formalized this system in which each UN member recognizes the territorial integrity and sovereignty of other members. Security barriers on political borders were largely unnecessary because the risk of invasion by a neighboring state subsided and was replaced by the performance of sovereignty in the form of a global visa and passport regime (Salter 2006; Torpey 2000). The border between Mexico and the United States, for example, does not mark a defensive line where each country is concerned about the invasion of the opposing military; instead, it marks the territorialized edge of different systems of law, economy, and politics (Craib 2004).
Over the twentieth century, the practice of absolute sovereignty over a bounded territory produced substantial wealth inequalities globally, which increased the desire of many people to move either to avoid deteriorating conditions in their home state or to seek better economic opportunities elsewhere (Agnew 2009; Baldwin et al. 2001). These movements, along with the possibility of hostile people or items passing into the state, resulted in a new purpose for borders as a location to prevent the unauthorized movement of people. The border barriers in the United States, India, and Israel – as well as the twenty-two other barriers begun since 2000 – must be understood in the context of this consolidation of authority over bounded territories and the subsequent divergence of wealth globally (see Table 1.1). The average annual per capita GDP (in 2010 USD) of the countries that have built barriers since the fall of the Berlin Wall is $14,067; the average for the countries on the other side of these barriers is $2,801. Consequently, the feelings of uncertainty from the global war on terror played a crucial role in justifying the construction of these barriers, but the underlying purposes and consequences cannot be understood through the narrow window of terrorism and security alone.
Although the stigma associated with building barriers on borders disappeared, barriers are still controversial, and even the terminology to describe these barriers is contentious. In Israel, the barrier is called the 'security fence' or the 'anti-terror fence.' In Palestine it is referred to as 'the wall' or the 'Apartheid wall.' The barrier itself also changes forms. In urban areas, near Jerusalem/al-Quds or in Qalqilya, it is a big concrete wall. However, the majority of the barrier is indeed a fence, but a very elaborate and expensive one. It has rolls of barbed wire, an accompanying road, as well as high-tech motion-detection systems. In English, fence and wall have distinct connotations. Fence sounds more temporary and permeable, evoking a picket fence or chain-link fence around a suburban yard. Wall, on the other hand, has the connotation of being much more permanent and solid with the strong sense that it blocks movement as well as vision. Neither accurately describes the entirety of the West Bank security project. Similarly, the US project is primarily a 'fence' but much more elaborate than the term normally implies. The Indian project is probably accurately described as a fence, but it also includes roads, barbed wire, and floodlights along its length. For clarity, throughout this book the more general term 'barrier' will be used to describe the new border security structures, except when quoting directly from interviews or other documents.
Ungoverned space and uncivilized people
Although the decisions to build barriers on these specific borders relied on different justifications in the United States, India, and Israel, they were based on similar representations of the territory on the other side as ungoverned and the people as uncivilized. The feelings of vulnerability generated by the actions of a very small number of terrorists were reanimated and mapped onto narratives about modernity and civilization. These civilizational narratives subsumed other considerations and made the barrier on the border – which previously had seemed incongruous with democratic ideals of openness and freedom – now seem essential to protect those same ideals from external threats. The negative stigma associated with barriers after the Berlin Wall disappeared and the security projects were rapidly completed.
In all three cases, the territory on the other side of these borders was described as an ungoverned space, where modern sovereign-state practices that bring order and stability were absent or incomplete. Narratives of civilization and wilderness are not a novel aspect of the discourse of the global war on terror but, rather, are emblematic of the expansion of the sovereign-state system around the world throughout the modern era (McClintock 1995; Said 1979). European colonialism was imbued with the idea of bringing civilization and modernity to the 'savages' that lived in the wilderness, although the underlying motive was capturing territory for resources and labor. European explorers treated most lands they encountered as terra nullius, or land belonging to no one, because they did not find what they considered to be modern forms of governance (Carter 1989). In the process of colonizing these lands, they also instituted new forms of territorial administration based on maps, surveys, and censuses of the people, which eventually formed the basis for the decolonized states that emerged after WWII (Edney 1997; Winichakul 1994).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Border Walls by Reece Jones. Copyright © 2012 Reece Jones. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Fortress Democracy1. Borders, Barriers, and the War on Terror
2. Securing the 'Homeland' in the United States
3. Border Fencing and the Global War on Terror in India
4. 'Arafat is our bin Laden': Territory and Terrorism in Israel and Palestine
5. Building Up, Rippling Out: Enforcement Practices at the US-Mexican Border
6. The Agents of Exception in the Indian Borderlands
7. The practices of Insecurity: The Barrier in the West Bank
8. The Enduring Significance of Borders
Appendix: Methodology and Methods
Notes
Bibliography
Index