Interventions in the political geographies of walls

Walls are symbolic and material manifestations of political boundaries. This Intervention builds upon recent work in political geography that considers borders as sovereign sites of security as well as mobile places of encounter (Johnson et al., 2011; Jones, 2012; Mountz, 2011). Walls may fulfill divisive state agendas through “conflict infrastructures” as Wendy Pullan describes in her Intervention; at the same time they may be used by borderland inhabitants to create “infrastructures of peace” as Charis Psaltis, Chara Makriyianni, Rana Zincir Celal, and Meltem Onurkan Samani argue. Through our focus on walls, we pay attention to new forms of state power, such as “resurgent sovereignty” (Butler, 2006), but also to what Lorraine Dowler describes as “place-based sovereigns” and their embodied practices, such as acts of witnessing that Juanita Sundberg portrays