Walls went up after the Berlin Wall came down

In her 2017 travelogue Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, the writer and poet Kapka Kassabova meets Emel, a loquacious Turkish civil servant who tells her that ‘the only good thing about a border is that you can cross it’. These words speak to an inherent contradiction. Borders stand as overt manifestations of national power. They represent what seems most fixed and immutable about the state. But in reality, what they do more than anything else is invite transgression.

This idea that borders are not quite what we perceive them to be is the thematic ballast for Klaus Dodds’s impressive and timely Border Wars. And it is a point worth making today, when a global pandemic has made borders a staple of both political rhetoric and the popular imagination. Even before Covid, Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to build a ‘beautiful’ border wall between the United States and Mexico, in large part because he knew this image resonated powerfully (if not luridly) with large chunks of the electorate.