Fences, Walls and Borders: State of Insecurity? – Montreal

The Raoul Dandurand Chair at the University of Quebec at Montreal and the Association for Borderlands Studies will hold Fences, Walls and Borders: State of Insecurity? May 19-20, 2011. The deadline for submitting abstracts is Oct. 15, 2010. Papers may be in French or English.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the question still remains “Do good fences still make good neighbours”? Since the Great Wall of China, construction of which began under the Qin dynasty, the Antonine Wall, built in Scotland to support Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman “Limes” or the Danevirk fence, the “wall” has been a constant in the protection of defined entities claiming sovereignty, East and West. But is the wall more than an historical relict for the management of borders? In recent years the wall has been given renewed vigour in North America, particularly along the U.S.-Mexico border, and in Israel, where the old Green line has been transformed into a wall separating Arab from Israeli. But the success of these new walls in the development of friendly and orderly relations between nations (or indeed, within nations) remains unclear. What role does the wall play in the development of security and insecurity? Do walls contribute to a sense of insecurity as much as they assuage fears and create a sense of security for those ‘behind the line’? Exactly what kind of security is associated with border walls?