Why, just two decades after international celebrations of the fall of
the Berlin Wall, are so many nation-states building elaborate walls at
or near their borders? Why walls now, given growing global connectedness
and given the general imperviousness of late modern powers -- from
capital to religion to terror -- to physical blockading? How do walls
shore up an imago of sovereign statehood and to what extent do they
fortify reactionary national imaginaries? What do the new walls perform
symbolically, materially, psychically?
In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown reflects on the
proliferation of nation-state walls in a time of eroded nation-state
sovereignty and intensifying transnational powers unleashed by
globalization. A leading theorist of neoliberalism, Brown argues that
although the new walls may demarcate existent or aspirational
nation-state boundaries, they do not arise as fortresses against
invading national armies or even as articulations of sovereign
statehood.
Rather, in a post-Westphalian context of increasing nonstate
transnational actors and powers, the new walls consecrate the very
boundary corruption they would contest as well as signify the
contemporary limitations of national and global governance by law or
political dictate. Even as walls theatrically display nation-state
sovereignty, they index with equal force the decline of sovereign state
power.
In a rare combination of powerful theory and precise historical,
political, and economic analysis, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty
provides a new -- indeed the first -- account of nation-state walling as
a distinctive contemporary phenomenon. For Brown, the frenzy of wall
building today reveals crucial predicaments of political power and
desire emerging from the waning of sovereignty, including new political
legitimacy deficits, new citizen anxieties, and new fusions of state and
non-state violence.
