Impact of ‘Walling’

Networks Disrupted; a Study of the Impact of ‘Walling’ on Contiguous Communities in Israel/Palestine and Cyprus

Aims

The escalating tendency of states and communities to build walls separating populations is becoming an endemic aspect of contemporary life. ‘Walls’ of various forms now divide Mexico and the United States, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the Spanish Protectorates of Ceuta and Mellila and Morocco as well as numerous other countries, and as I write the practice of walling is proliferating with, for an extreme example, a French company recently contracted to wall the entirety of Saudi Arabia’s land borders. Inter-state walling is paralleled on a micro-level by the proliferation of gated communities, enclaves and other spaces within national territory which are divided from the surrounding landscape and its peoples. Although walling to exclude ‘other’ populations has a long genealogy stretching at least as far back as the Great Wall of China and more recently to barriers such as the Berlin Wall (and its extension along the East-West German border), Belfast’s ‘Peace Walls’, and the Cypriot ‘Green Line’, it seems to be gaining increased popularity as globalisation and labour migration raises nationalist anxieties about the integrity of borders and as the technologies of ‘barrier construction’ become increasingly sophisticated and aggressively marketed. Despite this proliferation there has not, to date, been a concerted comparative project to investigate the ways in which ‘walling’ impacts upon local communities on both sides of the walls, changing not only practices but, perhaps more saliently, imaginings of self and other.

This project is a pilot study towards a more extensive comparative project; it investigates the Israeli ‘security’ barrier to assess the way in which its cutting of physical and social networks in the Bethlehem-Jerusalem region has affected local peoples, the way in which such sundered networks are replaced by new forms of social relations, and the way in which the social imaginaries of Israelis and Palestinians are reconfigured in the wake of the separation barrier. The project is supplemented by a less extensive study of the early stages of the dismantling of the ‘Green Line’ dividing Northern and Southern Cyprus intended, via a case study, to provide insights into the aftermath of a long-standing physical separation which might help in assessing the potential long-term impact of the Israeli wall.