On Saturday, October 15th from 4 to 6PM, please join Arcana: Books on the Arts as they welcome The LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design in partnership with Verso Books to present a conversation about the history of the US / Mexico border and the militarization of border walls around the world on the occasion of the launch of Reece Jones’ Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. Jones, an expert on international border security projects and a geographer at the University of Hawaii, will discuss his book with architect Rene Peralta.

Violent Borders breaks down the contradictions of living in a globalized world that simultaneously attempts to limit the free movement of people. Jones travels the border regions of the world, documenting the billions of dollars spent on border security projects, and their dire consequences for the majority of the people in the world. While the poor are restricted by the lottery of birth to slums and the aftershocks of decolonization, the wealthy travel freely, exploiting pools of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations.

The US / Mexico border – a major focus of the book – is a perfect example of the global hardening of borders. Over the past thirty years, many borders have been transformed into militarized security spaces through increased funding, deployments of additional guards, and construction of walls and surveillance infrastructure. While two-thirds of the border with Mexico remains unfenced, the federal fences are products of the relatively recent 2006 Secure Fence Act, and the Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call to build a wall on the remaining section of the border has been a major issue of the presidential election. Jones will make the case that borders are not the answer to our problems, and end on a simple, yet important idea: borders need not be a natural part of the human world.

Reece Jones is a Professor of Geography at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and the author of Border Walls, published by Zed Books in 2013. He is an award-winning scholar whose work has been featured in Time Magazine, The Economist, and Vice who is often called on to comment on border crises by publications such as the New York Times.

Rene Peralta is the co-founder of the Tijuana-based architectural firm Generica as well as the Director of the Architecture, Landscape + Urbanism program at the Woodbury University School of Architecture in San Diego. His recent work has been directed toward the research of social and cultural forms of urban border between the cities of Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California.