By - Imlisanen Jamir
There are fences you can see, and there are fences you feel. Some are topped with barbed wire. Others are dressed up in policy, spoken of in committee rooms, papered with words like “protection,” “preservation,” and “custom.” But fences are fences. And wherever they rise—across borders, minds, or markets—they tell you something ugly and honest about the people building them.
The rationale is always noble. We must preserve identity. We must safeguard land, language, culture. We must protect the “locals.” But peel back the layers and what often lies beneath is something far less romantic: the fear of dilution, the insecurity of being forgotten, or worse, being forced to share.
In many places, the politics of indigeneity has become the last line of defense against a tidal wave of economic inequality, cultural homogenization, and state neglect. The local turns into a mythic figure—guardian of tradition, bearer of rights, keeper of the flame. And for a while, it works. It slows down the machine. It provides a vocabulary for resistance, a sense of control in places where control is in short supply. But over time, the boundaries harden. The lines become walls. And identity, instead of being something lived, becomes something policed.
What gets forgotten in this grand theater is that not all “locals” are the same. Power within communities is as stratified as it is outside them. The same laws that keep out the outsider also keep in the underclass. Class, gender, clan, access—these fissures don’t disappear when the borders go up. In fact, they often grow sharper. When you draw a circle to keep others out, you also start redrawing the lines inside it. Who belongs. Who doesn’t. Who benefits. Who keeps the gate.
There’s something profoundly ironic about this. The idea of self-determination gets married to a kind of economic fatalism. You say you want to preserve your way of life, but you make it nearly impossible for that life to change, adapt, or thrive. You say you want development, but on terms so rigid that no investor, innovator, or working-class migrant could meet them. You speak the language of justice, but justice for whom? Often it is the landlord, the contractor, the power-broker dressed in native skin who gains most when the drawbridge is raised.
None of this is to say that communities shouldn’t have tools to protect themselves. They should. The brutal churn of globalization has made local governance, local ownership, and local pride more essential than ever. But protection without introspection is a cul-de-sac. If you build your house too tightly around you, you forget what the sky looks like. You forget to let the wind in.
The question, then, isn’t whether lines should exist. It’s who draws them, who they serve, and whether they allow room for empathy, movement, and change. Otherwise, they’re not lines of defense. They’re just the latest version of a very old trap.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
