Conclusions

A globalized world, “harbors fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription” (Brown 2010: 7). Walls are sites of tensions between global networks and local nationalism, territorialization and deterritorialization, national interests and the global markets (Brown 2010). The contributors to this volume have expanded inquiry concerning walls beyond their implications for sovereignty to explore how physical barriers and administrative boundaries embody ideas of national or group identity and alterity, the forces of the market, the construction of memories, the exertion of political agency and ways of waging war. Our authors have critiqued intellectual attempts to wall out violent spaces and to build safe places for the political; they explored manifestations and implications of physical and virtual walls, fading walls and emerging walls; they examined walls as artifacts of separation and sources of hybridization; they analyzed walls as points of application of power through surveillance and technologies of knowledge and as dividers of “safe” spaces subject to international presence from “unsafe” places abandoned to war, as well as sites of memorialization or oblivion. Finally, they investigated walls that, while not physically erected, were nonetheless constructed within other artifacts. All of the chapters in this book suggest the complexity of walls as heterotopias. As sites that do not embody a fixed meaning or social function, but that exist in complex relationships with other sites, walls both create and evidence a diverse array of meanings, governmental practices and different (and contingent) forms of social and economic power.