Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City

Frances Fukuyama infamously equated the fall of the Berlin Wall with the end of history, since he prophesized that this would mean that Western liberal democracy would become the definitive form of human government. This messianic belief found favour with the increasingly influential neo-conservative movement in America that promoted the notion of regime change within states like Iraq. Successive failures to embed democracy within Iraq have provoked Fukuyama to scale back his hubristic beliefs—a retreat that would be guaranteed by the revelation in 2007 that the occupation forces had constructed a 12-foot-high three-mile-long dividing wall around the Sunni district of Adhamiya in Baghdad. Iraq is not alone in the construction of such barriers, as similar walls have been constructed in the West Bank, the Saudi border with Yemen and even in a district of Padua populated largely by African immigrants. Some of the most prized liberties, such as freedom of...