Risk and Uncertainty

Understanding and Dialogue in the 21st Century

Olivier Urbain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351492874
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Conflict transformation requires, at minimum, a capacity to listen and respond constructively to those who are being hurt intentionally or unintentionally by others. This compendium attempts to understand the ways in which borders and boundaries are manifestations of less visible dynamics in individual or collective human consciousness.Nur Yalman asks how certain theories, such as the Huntington thesis, become deadly in their consequences. Omar Moufakkir and Ian Kelly analyze Dutch Moroccan relations. Sverre Lodgaard outlines the interrelationship between geo-politics, emerging concepts of world order, and nuclear weapon policies. Anthony Marsella critically analyses the Fukushima nuclear disaster.The lessons drawn in this volume underline the importance of communication, honesty, and a concerned government responsive to the needs of citizens in crisis. Each of these contributions is grappling with different ways in which words, theories, ideologies, and perspectives can hurt or heal, divide or unite, reconcile or destroy.

The Role of Walls, Borders, and Boundaries
in National and International Affairs:
Typology, Underlying Trends, and
Implications for Conflict Resolution

Tatsushi Arai, Eileen Babbitt, Kevin P. Clements,
Sverre Lodgaard, Chaiwat Satha-Anand

Introduction

Human beings set boundaries. Close family members, for example, despite their closeness, often find it useful for their rooms to be separated from one another when they need privacy. Households living next to each other erect fences or at least lines of demarcation so that they know where their property starts and ends. Governing authorities of provinces and states are engaged in a constant process of boundary definition and defense. Alliances of states and nations draw metaphorical and actual boundaries around their own territories and areas of responsibility and undertake to provide protection and security to insiders, with diminished responsibility toward those who are not members of these moral and political communities.

These boundaries often represent visible manifestations of less visible dynamics growing in individual or collective human consciousness. These unconscious and conscious dynamics generate a separation of Self from Other and “us” from “them.” These internal and external boundaries often evolve in a self-reinforcing, cyclical manner. Behavioral and perceptual patterns and boundaries developed over time have a tendency to become normative and familiar frames of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Institutionalized and routinized relationships within and across these boundaries—horizontal or hierarchical, symmetrical or asymmetrical—become structural sources of power, privilege, and prestige.

This chapter explores a special kind of boundary—seemingly impermeable boundaries that sustain and deepen divisions within and between nations, called walls. We explore the ways in which walls can both create and help manage conflict at micro, meso, and macro levels, but argue that more often than not they are dysfunctional and impediments to real security and the nonviolent transformation of conflict because they constrain contact, communication, and confidence building. By creation of conflict we refer to its emergence (with latent conflict becoming manifest), escalation (in terms of intensity and magnitude), polarization, dehumanization, and refusal to recognize adversaries. By management we refer to a broad spectrum of conflict-handling behavior such as conflict mitigation (of intensity and scope) and institutionalization (to regulate excessive behavior). Importantly, the root causes of such conflicts have their own momentum which is either exacerbated or mitigated by the presence of a wall.

First, we touch on the inherent functions of walls in human society and then move to a brief review of historical antecedents of contemporary walls, illustrating differences and similarities across cultures and regions. In the recent past, two kinds of walls that have become prevalent in many regions of the world—the walls of national sovereignty and the walls of nationalism—analyzing these leads into a proposed typology of walls in contemporary international relations: political walls, walls for national security, trade walls, religious walls, and civilizational walls. These categories are not exhaustive, but indicative of some of the most pressing current challenges to peace and security. We follow with a discussion of barriers between sociopolitical processes: between economic cooperation and security policy, between interdependence and integration, and around civil society networks and international companies. Finally, we explore deeper trends and patterns underlying these various types of walls and what they might mean for the theory and practice of conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

The Functions of Borders, Boundaries, and Walls

Boundary formation begins from the moment a baby realizes that it exists separately from its mother. This primal separation is the beginning of a lifelong process of boundary formation. Processes of attachment, detachment, and the formation of personal boundaries are critical to the development of personal, social, and cultural identities and it is never ending as each individual, group, and nation considers how tightly or loosely to privilege and bind their own interests in relation to those of others (Bretherton 1992).

This process is the source of many ethical and political dilemmas. How much, for example, can individuals promote their group and selfinterest without harming others? What responsibilities do individuals, groups, and nations have for the welfare of others? How tightly or widely do actors wish to draw their boundaries of care and compassion, and inclusion and exclusion?

In most ofthese discussions, there is a taken-for-granted responsibility for and inclusion of nuclear and extended family members in one’s immediate and privileged social group. These family relationships are critical for survival and are the most important source of personal and social identity. As Bowlby and others have indicated (i.e., Bretherton 1992), successful attachment between mother and child is critical to the enhancement of individual and social capacity in adulthood.

These successful familial affiliations extend to wider kin connections, linguistic communities, and those occupying particular contiguous spaces. At each level, individuals draw boundaries between self and others, with all that this means in terms of autonomy and connection. Concepts of “Self’ are determined by primary familial affiliation, chosen groups, and other communities of belonging. It is in these places that individuals discover who they are, personally, socially, and culturally. The evolution of the social self requires inclusion in social groups capable of satisfying needs and functions in simple and complex natural and social environments. Well before the nation-state, therefore, were family groups and communities.

The hunter-gatherer societies that dominated the world until 9,000 BCE were based on relatively egalitarian family and kin groups and were well adapted to a wide variety of different kinds of environment. Marshall Sahlins in his paper “Notes on the Original Affluent Society” (1972) suggests not only that such communities were egalitarian but they were also relatively affluent in the sense that they could satisfy basic human needs with high levels of mutual exchange and sharing of resources. These communities were also relatively borderless. There were no territorial markers, no concept of proprietorial rights, and certainly no walls between them.

It was in the movement from nomadic hunter-gatherer communities to more settled agricultural communities that individuals and social groups were confronted by issues of scarcity and felt obliged to demarcate boundaries around arable and cultivated land. These communities also developed hierarchies of power, privilege, prestige, and specific patterns of resource distribution. In the competition for scarce resources, but particularly during periods of crop failure and famine, warfare was used to garnish resources necessary for survival and communities became more territorial in orientation. This was the period when nations started emerging from relatively autocephalous communities and developed ideas of bounded spaces with clear ideas of who should be included and excluded or considered insiders and outsiders, friends or enemies.

What distinguishes a political community, state, and nation from other kinds of community is the organization of power and coercive capacity. Tilly argues “that war makes the state and states make war” (Tilly 1975, 35). This process of state formation, however, only happens if political actors have started thinking in terms of particular communities and in terms of “friends and foes.” It is difficult to justify expenditure on the military, for example, in the absence of threat, fear, or desire for domination.

Friend/foe dialectics underpin nineteenth-century nationalism and the formation of modern states. These dynamics, however, can only take place when politics have become centered and territorialized. These dialectics are used to mark political boundaries. The boundary markers in state formation as in identity formation are language, culture, dress, and specific types of behavior. If collectivities are confident about the capacity of these sorts of markers to signal to outsiders where communities begin and end, the barriers between them and others are likely to be subtle, nonobtrusive, and relatively porous. Where there is insecurity, fear, or challenges to these subtle markers then political actors will move to establish clearer, more material markers. These can vary from custom posts to clearly marked borders of fences, barbed wires, and solid walls. The function of these political walls, like normal architectural walls, is to define, demarcate, and protect those within from those without.

The Historical Antecedents of Contemporary Walls

Walls shaping and reshaping contemporary international relations have long historical roots. Different cultures have given different forms and meanings to them, but the similarities are striking.

The following are some glimpses into the history of walls, region by region, indicating the range of manifestations and functions with no claim to comprehensiveness. The most prominent of them comes from Asia—the Great Wall of China—which is said to be the only human construction visible to the naked eye if seen from the Moon. The section begins in East Asia, moves on to magical walls in Southeast Asia, continues with an unusual Indian “wall” as reflected in a best-selling Indian novel, and touches on the mythical stories of walls in the ancient Middle East before ending up with the European experiences that gave rise to international law.

The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is more than a very long wall; it is a fortress system consisting also of battlements and fortresses. There are six main routes along the wall and six secondary zigzagging routes with the combined length of 6,318 km or 3,923 miles. The Qin emperor (221-210 BCE) built the Wall on remains constructed in earlier dynasties. What appears today as the Great Wall is therefore a product of several renovations and rebuilding, mostly in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Scholars maintain that Qin Shi Huangdi chose to protect the new consolidated kingdom with the wall out of suspicion of the nomads’ threat (Fryer 1975). While the Great Wall could also be seen as a cultural wall separating the agrarian Chinese society from the nomadic cattle-based economy (Lattimore 1962), later scholars argue that the Wall itself could not have been built without collaboration from different nomadic groups (Cheng 1984). Symbolically, the Wall could mean different things: evidence of a tyrannical rule of the past; a cultural border between “civilized China” and threatening barbaric nomads, nurturing nationalist sentiments; or collaborative efforts by different ethnic groups in redefining a more unified China.

Two Centuries of Japanese Isolationism

Through a series of historical incidents and actions such as the Shimabara Rebellion—Japan’s last large-scale internal strife (1637-1638)—the Tokugawa shogunate closed Japan’s doors by placing strict limitations on the entry of foreigners to the country and on the departure of Japanese citizens, roughly from 1633 to 1854. The main purposes of this foreign policy were to stop the spread of Christianity and to regulate commerce and foreign exchange. However, this “locked” status was not complete. The shogunate assigned trade rights through specific Japanese port cities to a limited number of partners: a Dutch factory and China traded through Nagasaki, Korea and Ryukyu (present Okinawa) traded through Satsuma (present Kagoshima), and the Ainu people were able to trade through Ezo (present Hokkaido). By doing so, the shogunate tried to manage all foreign trade so that the profit from it could be controlled by the shogunate. It also tried to protect the nation from total depletion of its mineral resources, such as gold, silver, and copper. This foreign policy ended when Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy forced the Shogun to sign the “Treaty of Peace and Amity” in 1854, reopening Japan to exposure from abroad. By then, however, this semi-isolationist period had already had a deeply engrained effect on Japanese culture.

Southeast Asian Walls

In traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms, walls have always been common. From studies of ancient cities in Thailand, it was found that each city was composed of similar elements: surrounding moats, walls, city gates, fortresses, religious space, houses, ponds, dykes, water canals, and roads outside the city. But among these, the most important are walls and surrounding moats designed to defend against outside enemies. The walls were also seen as irrefutable signposts of a kingdom’s greatness.

One of the most dramatic stories in the Old Malay Peninsula is about the city of Ligor. It was written that in 1348, the righteous king led more than 30,000 of his subjects through the forests for more than eight years to flee from cholera. The king came upon the site of the Enlightened Buddha’s bones and decided to establish a new city there. He then founded the city of Ligor and mobilized his people, many of them Indians and ethnic Mons, to build a city wall made of bricks and clays, with area outside to grow food for the inhabitants. The most persistent enemy, however, was not human but cholera. Determined to stay put inside the city, the king tried to find a way to stop the spread of cholera. After consultation with learned monks and knowledgeable court Brahmins, he was advised to create the magical “Namo” (the beginning word in Buddhist chant) coins. Endowed with magic, these coins were scattered around the city walls as a magical way to protect the city from the curse of cholera. Since then, the city of Ligor has lived in peace free from such epidemics, and the “Namo” coins can still be found near the city wall today. Apart from the fact that the wall to this ancient magnificent city was a collaborative work done by people from different ethnic backgrounds, this story underscores the fact that a wall could be more than a protective structure against human enemy and the elements. Before the advent of the time of modem medicine, when endowed with some magical qualities, it could also protect those inside from the curse of an epidemic.

“No” and the Indian Wall

India has a different kind of wall to protect Indians. In Maximum City, a novel by Suketu Mehta, there is a section titled “The Country of the No,” where the author tells the tale of the guru in the shishya tradition where the novice is rebuffed several times when approaching the guru. Then the guru will stop saying “no” but will not say “yes” either which means he suffers from the presence of the student. Then when he starts acknowledging him, he will assign several menial tasks to the student, meant to drive him away. After the disciple sticks it out, through these stages of rejection, he will be considered suitable for the study under the guru or worthy of the sublime knowledge. Mehta writes: “‘India is the country of the No.’ That ‘no’ is your test. You have to get past it. It is India’s Great Wall; it keeps out foreign invaders” (Mehta 2004, 18). In fact, from the soil of this country, great souls such as the Buddha and Mohandas K. Gandhi had used the “No” to usher in great human transformation: toward enlightenment from sufferings in the former case and emancipation from colonial rule for the latter.

Walls and Norms of Purity in the Middle East

Apart from the Crying Wall situated to the west of King Solomon’s ancient temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE after the Jewish revolt, there is another famous wall in the many fantastic stories told about the Middle East—that of Jericho.

In the Hebrew Bible , Moses warned the Israelites that before they entered Canaan, they would face “large cities that have walls up to the sky” (Deuteronomy 9:1). When Joshua led them across the River Jordan, they reached and laid siege to one such city—Jericho. Jericho’s great wall was destroyed at the sound of the priests blowing their rams’ horns with the shouting of the Israelites on the seventh day that th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Role of Walls, Borders, and Boundaries in National and International Affairs: Typology, Underlying Trends, and Implications for Conflict Resolution
• 2 Deadly Theories and the Limits of Cultural Rationality: The “Clash of Civilizations” Revisited
• 3 Tourism and Goodwill: Dutch Attitudes toward Moroccans
• 4 Enlarging Boundaries of Compassion in a Time of Global Crisis
• 5 Crowded with Conciliators: Exploring Multiparty Mediation in Civil Wars
• 6 The Next Step for Conflict Prevention
• 7 The Promise of Truth Telling for Learning about the Past: The Case of the Rwandan Gacaca Courts
• 8 Is Peace Journalism the Moral Responsibility of War Journalists?
• 9 Nuclear Weapons and World Order
• 10 The Fukushima Mega-Disaster: Ten “Lessons to Be Learned” for Japan and the World
• Contributors