Summary of The Age of Walls
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Recommendation
Those taken aback by the illiberal leanings of US President Donald Trump might think of his promise to build a “big, beautiful wall” along the Mexican border as something of an aberration. In truth, Trump is late to the wall-building game. While Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie has been relegated to Europe’s history bin, many a wall has risen elsewhere. In this engaging study, journalist Tim Marshall takes an inventory of boundaries across the globe. Today, security structures separate South Africa from Zimbabwe, Israel from Palestine, Turkey from Syria and India from Bangladesh. Marshall paints such physical fences as metaphors for the wider, more ephemeral divides among the world’s peoples, who find themselves increasingly segregated by income, faith, language and ideology. Marshall is, clearly, no fan of walls or of nationalism; but his analysis comes across as clear-eyed rather than politically motivated, and offers unique insights into the world’s fragile and fraught geopolitics.
About the Author
Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs who spent 25 years as a journalist at Sky News and the BBC. He wrote two earlier books in his Politics of Place series, Prisoners of Geography and Worth Dying For: the Power and Politics of Flags.