Bridging the divide: Middle Eastern walls and fences and the spatial governance of problem populations

Building on a long history of spatial control through walling in the region, walls and fences have been built in the Middle East in recent years to undertake a range of practices. Gated communities, residential and security compounds, anti-migrant walls, separation barriers and counter-insurgency fences can all be found in the Middle East. These walls address and govern problems that take the population as their subject. These walls all share a common frame of viewing the populations they work to govern as ‘problematic’ in multiple ways. This paper explores how walls have been and continue to be used in governing populations through mobility and incorporating a combination of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques through a range of spatial and territorial repertoires. As such it works to bridge the divide in border studies and critical security studies between geopolitical/topographical and biopolitical/topological approaches to borders and governance.