Walled States, Waning Sovereignty
by Wendy Brown
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Why do walls marking national boundaries proliferate amid widespread proclamations of global connectedness and despite anticipation of a world without borders? Why are barricades built of concrete, steel, and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturized, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed, or networked? In "Walled States, Waning Sovereignty," Wendy Brown considers the recent spate of wall building in contrast to the erosion of nation-state sovereignty. Drawing on show more classical and contemporary political theories of state sovereignty in order to understand how state power and national identity persist amid its decline, Brown considers both the need of the state for legitimacy and the popular desires that incite the contemporary building of walls. The new walls -- dividing Texas from Mexico, Israel from Palestine, South Africa from Zimbabwe -- consecrate the broken boundaries they would seem to contest and signify the ungovernability of a range of forces unleashed by globalization. Yet these same walls often amount to little more than theatrical props, frequently breached, and blur the distinction between law and lawlessness that they are intended to represent. But if today's walls fail to resolve the conflicts between globalization and national identity, they nonetheless project a stark image of sovereign power. Walls, Brown argues, address human desires for containment and protection in a world increasingly without these provisions. Walls respond to the wish for horizons even as horizons are vanquished. show lessTags
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I've been reading and thinking about sovereignty for months without being able to get a grasp on contemporary sovereignty. With this short book, Brown has clarified a number of critical points for me. Finally, someone has put the pieces together in a way that retains rather than diluting the salience of the modernist definition of sovereignty while also recognizing its inevitable incompleteness and positing a vision of post-Westphalian sovereignty!
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In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown takes as her starting point the idea that the theological is both the origin of and ongoing supplement to political sovereignty, and sets out to think about walls – the material-symbolic borders of the nation-state – in the context of post-Westphalian geopolitics. Her suggestion is that contemporary acts of walling can be read as symptoms show more of a theological anxiety induced by the numerous forces that attack and erode nation-state boundaries. As state sovereignty is battered by global capital (increasingly assuming a godlike universal sovereignty of its own), walls are built as prophylaxes against mobile labour, disease, terror, and the innumerable other forces real and unreal that threaten to puncture and undermine the myth of the sovereign state. show less
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Author Information
23+ Works 1,378 Members
Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches political theory. Her recent books include Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (2015) and Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010).
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