Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

For anyone with an interest this article is cut down and pared slice of a portion of the work of Dr. Olivier Walther and Dr. Steven Radil, geographers at the University of Florida.

A somewhat longer article of theirs is Why African Borderlands Keep Burning (April 15, 2026) - https://africanarguments.org/2026/04/why-african-borderlands...

and a recent paper Mapping the long-term trajectories of political violence in Africa (MARCH 2026) - https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06502

Fortifications never went anywhere.

Just in this century, the US used fortified camps in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so did the French in Sahel. And the Ukrainians fortified Dombas and effectively prevented the Russians to take it quickly. Then the Russians fortified the Zaporizhzhia frontline (the Surovikin line) which stopped the Ukrainian counter offensive in 2023.

And talking about Africa in particular, the border between Morocco and Algeria, and also Western Sahara, has been a fortified wall for the past 40 years now.

Coincidentally, this morning I happened to be in a hotel room where there was a TV-set showing some random TV channel, and there was a documentary showing that medieval-style fortifications have come back in the form of the new building of the US embassy in London, which is surrounded by a moat, presumably for fear of terrorists.

I thought walled towns died not due to state authority becoming stronger, but because offensive weaponry simply became effective enough to overcome walls. Walls can protect you from men with swords, but not from heavy artillery or bombers. Today, wouldn't a fleet of cheap drones render a wall moot?

The UK built [1] castles in Afghanistan recently too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion

In many of Latin America big towns and most of border towns, most middle-class houses are tiny versions of fortresses.

It is a sign of police incompetence, government collapse and the fact that those places are ruled by gangsters.

"Newly walled towns are a sign of shrivelling state authority" was my thought when I saw the walled off Capitol.

It is sad when the government needs walls to protect itself from its own people, a sign of weakness. To add to the irony the Capitol used to be, quite literally, the "people's house."

Awesome

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