Les barrières frontalières : archaïsmes inadaptés ou renforts du pouvoir étatique?

• Main Author: Marie Didiot
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Reims Champagne-Ardennes 2013-07-01
• Series: L'Espace Politique
• Subjects: border barriers; wall; fence; security; clandestine immigration; transnational flows
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/espacepolitique/2626

Since the early 2000s about twenty border barriers were built along the most important political, religious and socioeconomic discontinuities around the world. The aim of such edifices is to screen the flows that builder governments regard as harmful or undesirable. However the materiality and territorial anchorage of border barriers contrast with globalization. Indeed the latter is characterized by intense and deterritorialized flows. So the border barriers mission is paradoxical : They have to control some flows whose reality calls borders legitimacy into question. Are border barriers, whose effectiveness is controversial, inappropriate for securing a territory and its population ? But in the greatest contemporary democracies border barriers also have a subjective role of domestic policy carried out by their physical presence.