*Originally published in 2013. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work.

Globalization seems to homogenize the world as technology dissolves the barriers of time and space. The proliferation of international actors and links appears to eat away at the very foundations of the Westphalian state system. Where the global meets the local is at the walls that define the external objective boundaries of political units and the internal subjective identities of their citizens.

As walls dissolve, they also spread. Walls have spread physically with the globalizing architecture of the modern world; and they have spread virtually through the proliferation of wall signs, symbols, and images. They are vertical exclamations interrupting the horizontal flow of space. Walls are the thin hard shells of cities and nations. In the modern world, moreover, walls no longer only sit on the physical ground but occupy cyberspace as well.

Walls thus appear where one might think them least likely, in the broadcasts of news media with global aspirations. Two networks—CNN and BBC have created news broadcasts that aspire to a global, rather than a regional, national, or local audience. More recently Aljazeera has launched an English language television news program. All three networks either broadcast in English or wish to do so and have created websites that shadow their regular television programming. As part of an ongoing research program on globalizing media, we captured these websites for brief sampling periods in July and November 2004 and more comprehensively for all of 2005. We recorded at regular midnight intervals and then searched the resulting files for walls.

Modern media carry images of and references to walls. Many of the discrete references are figures of speech. The BBC sample, for example, includes the following figurative phrases: backs against the wall, chest wall, crater wall, mark on the wall, torn down walls, wall of silence, wall-to-wall, and writing on the wall. Wall Street gets quite a lot of play. Talk about the interplay of signifiers—a street named for a wall that refers to the American financial community. But there are also many physical walls in the news broadcasts. The walls are often destroyed in natural or human catastrophes like earthquakes, floods, or warfare.

We may think of these as private walls, important to their owners but without wider public significance. Beyond these private walls stand public walls with political significance as they enclose and separate larger political communities. Such walls gratify some and offend others.........

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