Walls built for protection often become permanent. Rather than ending conflict, they institutionalise it. This co-authored presentation asks why barriers erected as temporary measures so often outlast the emergencies that justified them, and what this reveals about how security actually works.

Presentation

Walls built for protection often become permanent. Rather than ending conflict, they institutionalise it. This co-authored presentation asks why barriers erected as temporary measures so often outlast the emergencies that justified them, and what this reveals about how security actually works.

In the first part, Valentina Surace develops a philosophical framework for understanding walled borders. Globalisation, she observes, was born between two walls : the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the recent construction of barriers along the US-Mexico border. Drawing on Jacques Derrida and Roberto Esposito, she examines the logic of immunity, the drive to seal off inside from outside, self from other. Yet total immunity is self-defeating. A body that rejects all foreign contact cannot survive ; a community that walls itself in risks suffocation. Protection slides toward self-destruction.

In the second part, Aisling Reid turns to Belfast’s ‘peace’ walls. More than twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement, these barriers remain. Stretching 32 kilometres across the city, they form Europe’s longest urban border wall. They are not remnants of past conflict but functioning infrastructure : gates still lock at night, cameras still watch, steel mesh still rises above the original concrete. Drawing on Michel Foucault and Étienne Balibar, Reid argues that the walls do not mark a passage from conflict to peace. Instead, they convert open hostility into managed separation. Violence is perpetuated rather than resolved. Security, on this account, does not aim at reconciliation. It operates by maintaining division.

Speakers

• Dr. Valentina Surace (University of Messina)
• Dr. Aisling Reid (Queen’s University Belfast)

Practical Information

• Date : May 27, 2026
• Time : 16 :00 BST / 17 :00 CET (Time zone converter : https://dateful.com/time-zone-converter)
• Format : Online (Access link will be provided upon registration)
• Registration : Attendance is free, but registration is required. Please register via the following link : https://www.tickettailor.com/events/entangledhistoriesseminarseries/2222175