Bridging the Divide: Middle Eastern Walls and Fences and the Spatial Governance of Problem Populations

Abstract

Building on a long history of spatial control through walling in the region, walls and fences have been built in the Middle East in recent years to undertake a range of practices. Gated communities, residential and security compounds, anti-migrant walls, separation barriers and counter-insurgency fences can all be found in the Middle East. These walls address and govern problems that take the population as their subject. These walls all share a common frame of viewing the populations they work to govern as 'problematic' in multiple ways. This paper explores how walls have been and continue to be used in governing populations through mobility and incorporating a combination of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques through a range of spatial and territorial repertoires. As such it works to bridge the divide in border studies and critical security studies between geopolitical/topographical and biopolitical/topological approaches to borders and governance.

Hotspots and the geographies of humanitarianism

“…The popular refrain 'Fortress Europe' evokes Europe's attempts to contain disaster beyond its external borders. However, as recent Foucauldian influenced work on walling as a security practice has argued, seeing borders as blockades and walls as containers alone, fails to understand how they work as spaces and architectures of effective management (see Pallister-Wilkins, 2015b. This is not to argue that humanitarian concerns for life do not make use of specific technologies of containment in particular instances.…”

“…Here, we see the use of spatial and carceral techniques of government to secure wider processes of circulation. In earlier work, I explored such spatial practices in relation to the work that security barriers do in securing populations, not through blocking in their entirety but through carefully calibrating life in the Foucauldian sense (see Pallister-Wilkins, 2015b. Humanitarianism engages in similar calibrating practices through refugee camps.…”

Biopolitical bordering: Enacting populations as intelligible objects of government

“…Since then the concept has been picked up by numerous scholars (e.g. Pallister-Wilkins, 2015; van Baar, 2016; Vaughan-Williams, 2015). While this body of literature has done a great job in facilitating ‘a paradigm shift in border studies from a geopolitical to a biopolitical horizon of analysis’ (Vaughan-Williams, 2015, pp.…”

Feminist geopolitics and the Middle East: Refuge, belief, and peace

“…The collective research of geographers on the historical and present experiences of displacement and encampment in the Middle East, especially regarding Palestinian refugees and Israel–Palestine relations, offer conceptual tools to understand the current crisis. Geographers view walls, camps, checkpoints, and settlements as both “object and process” (Abourahme, , p. 203): material assemblage and social relation (Abourahme, , Hughes, , Martin, , Natanel, , Parsons & Salter, , Pallister‐Wilkins, , Ramadan, , Smith, ). They are spaces inhabited by geopolitical agents, people, and objects that forge a “subaltern geopolitics” (Sharp, ) of care and contestation (Amir, , Ramadan, , Smith, ).…”

“…Spaces of enclosure-the "camp" and border walls-have been fixtures in the Middle East landscape far earlier than the current migrant crisis, illustrated in the approximately 1.5 million Palestinians residing in refugee camps Hughes, 2016, Martin, 2015, Natanel, 2016, Parsons & Salter, 2008, Pallister-Wilkins, 2015, Ramadan, 2013, Smith, 2011. They are spaces inhabited by geopolitical agents, people, and objects that forge a "subaltern geopolitics" (Sharp, 2011) of care and contestation (Amir, 2014, Ramadan, 2013, Smith, 2011.…”