ABSTRACT
Wall announcing and wall building has become a popular practice amongst many politicians in Western liberal democracies. In this chapter, we discuss the return of old-fashioned material borders in Europe, but also their intended and unintended porosity. We do this by reflecting on the ‘immunitarian’ role played by these walls in a context of increasing populist calls to (visibly) stop the ‘invasions of irregular migrants’ and respond to terrorist threats. We argue that walls are less about ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’, and more a spatial technology aimed at symbolically governing the body politic of the concerned countries, that is, an immunitarian practice to preserve the idea of a possible and final territorial integrity. While these practices may have deadly effects on the migrant body, in the long run they may also be (self)destructive for the real-and-imagined national communities they are supposed to protect and preserve.
