Do good fences make good neighbours?

In his simple and deep poem Mending Wall Robert Frost imagines a dialogue with his New England neighbour about mending the crumbling drystone wall that separates their farms, where cattle no longer run. He points out that the wall is now not needed:

His taciturn neighbour remains unconvinced:

Frost then poses questions that now animate many discussions of justice in a globalising world:

Are walls and fences, borders and boundaries, needed for good relations and for justice? Or do they impose and perpetuate injustice? What violations are likely if they are no longer maintained? Can the ‘walling in or walling out’ that borders create and maintain be justified? Is the ‘mischief’ that tempts Frost to be rejected or embraced? Walls have been built and mended to exclude and include since time immemorial: walled cities and forts, garden walls and farm fences, the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall, the Berlin Wall, the walls of apartheid townships and the West Bank Barrier (its very name disputed) all aim to ‘wall in and wall out’. But when and how do the exclusions they maintain make for a more and when for a less just world?

Boundaries and borders

We live in a world of innumerable structures that ‘wall in and wall out’, and in particular of countless boundaries and countless boundary crossings. The boundaries that we often think of as borders usually separate states or lesser jurisdictions, and for the most part form clear demarcations. Other boundaries are fuzzier. They include boundaries between societies and nations, between languages and religions, between ideologies and cultures, between ecologies and economies.