Towards Complexity Thinking in Border Wall Studies

Border studies increasingly speak of borders as complex entities that, beyond their supposedly one-dimensional, linear material and territorial manifestations, depend on the interplay of different practices, discourses, artifacts, bodies, and knowledges in order to become effective as emergent borders. In our paper, we discuss a perspective on border complexities and, using the example of the COVID-19 pandemic, ask about the methodological consequences for border wall studies. The argument is that it is complex processes that make walls and fences an ordered and orderly instrument of power in the first place.
Our paper traces the development towards complexity thinking within border studies and shows that current approaches not only differ in their consistency in implementing complexity-theoretical insights but also circulate different versions of what is referred to as border complexities. In terms of conceptual synthesis, we outline through a consistent perspective inspired by complexity theory, the central principles of which we outline using empirical observations. In the unique situation of the global COVID-19 pandemic, in which border closures were seen as an effective means of combating the pandemic, key characteristics of border complexities emerged: emergent multi-scalar linkages, dispersed discursive and material border practices, or unpredictable temporal and social developments mark self-dynamic entanglements in which the border is assigned a quality that goes far beyond the significance of its individual parts.
The paper concludes with a set of methodological principles that can guide empirical studies of border walls, which are confronted with the increasing complexity of their research objects. Thus, a complexity perspective calls for methodological border introspection that allows us to uncover the order of the border itself, thus making it possible to understand how or what makes walls and fences into “border walls and border fences”.