What do “border fences” between the United States and Mexico, India and Bangladesh, South Africa and Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and Israel and the Palestinian territories have in common? According to Wendy Brown, these walls and fortifications are reactions to a singularly contemporary phenomenon: the decline of sovereignty in the nation-state due to contending economic and security imperatives.
On the one hand, the globalization of people, goods, and capital demands an unprecedented degree of openness across states and territories—one that, paradoxically, undermines the sovereignty of the very states whose power helps constitute and sustain this world order. On the other hand, the proliferation of (and perhaps overreaction to) transnational and subnational security threats posed by terrorists, drug smugglers, and other criminal networks has brought about a retrenchment at the borders—an attempt by putatively sovereign states to reassert themselves against nontraditional threats that undermine their image as unitary and all-powerful actors within their territory. Thus, in an era of increasing insecurity for the modern nation-state, “the new walls project an image of sovereign jurisdictional power and an aura of the bounded and secure nation that are at the same time undercut by their existence and also by their functional inefficiency.”
Brown, a professor of political science at Berkeley, employs diverse modes of investigation to examine the phenomenon of walling. Insights from psychoanalysis (especially Freud père et fille), critical theory (Derrida, Foucault, and Agamben), and political philosophy (Hobbes, Locke, and especially Schmitt) all figure prominently in her argument. Indeed, Walled States brims with keen observations about the current political, economic, and social tensions and pathologies these walls simultaneously instantiate and seek to redress, and provides a vibrant account of a pivotal phenomenon in twenty-first-century international politics.
While the force of Brown's argument is sometimes attenuated by her overreliance on the technical language often employed in critical theory, and her overwhelming focus on the United States and Israel (and subsequent under-theorizing of wall building and fortification in the developing world) appears to be based more on personal preference than rigorous justification, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty will surely appeal to philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, and critical theorists alike.
