A University of Connecticut faculty member and author gave a lecture about how walls divide communities and how to overcome them at the Dodd Center on April 22.
Speaker James Waller serves as the inaugural Christopher J. Dodd Chair in Human Rights Practice. He is also a professor for the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute (HRI) and the Department of Literatures, Cultures, & Languages.
According to the event website, Waller’s lecture, titled: “Our Walled World: Identity & Separation in Deeply Divided Societies,” is the Genocide Awareness Lecture at UConn for Genocide Prevention and Awareness Month.
The event began with Kathryn Libal, the director of UConn’s HRI, introducing Waller and his many accomplishments, including his six published books that focus on genocide and violence.
Waller explained how his fascination with walls and their part in the division of society began while referring to locations he studied, especially Northern Ireland. When he was interviewing a political prisoner from Belfast for a project, Waller said they told him, “These walls entered into our souls.” The moment stuck with Waller and compelled him to dig deeper into the issue.
Then, Waller described what constitutes a deeply divided society, which walls enforce.
“A central defining feature [of deeply divided societies] is binary division, two contrasting segments of population that represent a cleavage significant enough to impact a wide range of issues,” Waller said. “These fault lines can come from a lot of different areas, class, caste, religion, language, race, clan, political identity.”
Waller classified walls into four different types, all reinforcing division between people, communities and identities.
“[Walls] create reinforced divisions, fear and even paranoia of people that would be referred to as ‘them,’” Waller said.
First were physical walls, which physically divide groups of people. Waller brought up the United States-Mexico border wall and Berlin Wall as examples. He stressed that physical walls occur on smaller scales, like an existing nine-foot wall underground in a Northern Ireland cemetery, dividing the resting place between Protestants and Catholics.
Waller continued with symbolic walls, referring to territorial divides that dictate where groups of people might live and markers that distinguish them. He said this encapsulates things like flag placement, languages on signs and gated communities, especially in places with contesting identities.
He extended the connection to fans of sports teams, where loyalty can mean “an identity state.” Sometimes, embracing a team is “a statement about class, it’s a statement, about religion, it’s a statement about nationality.”
The third classification was hidden walls of geographic division. Waller described the form as ways communities are constructed, either initially or over time, to separate people. Waller said practices like redlining and highway placement are two ways these hidden walls function.
Waller pointed out how these hidden walls are present in Hartford’s history. He said redlining made West Hartford a richer, predominantly white community, while the North End of Hartford ended up with a higher Black population and less resources. The I-84 and I-91 interchange in Hartford allowed residents from West Hartford to easily access the city and keep the communities separate.
Waller’s final classification of walls were paper walls of legal division, meaning the laws enacted by governments to divide people. Waller brought up historical examples, like Adolf Hitler’s succession of anti-Jewish legislation and the many U.S. laws discriminating against Native Americans, African Americans and Japanese Americans during WWII.
For a more modern example, Waller tied in President Donald Trump’s executive order: “Protecting The American People Against Invasion,” signed into effect on Jan. 20, 2025. Waller pointed out how the wording of the order creates this divide between people and spreads fear. Waller also mentioned the order’s criticism for suspending due process and revoking visas.
After outlining the types of walls, Waller emphasized how we should “build bridges and stop walls.” He said that even though walls can foster a sense of identity, they do more to “magnify social difference.”
Waller said that we can build bridges by recognizing the walls around us, how they function and how they restrict us. From there, he stressed the use of research-based inclusivity efforts that involve relational spaces to reconnect separated groups.
Afterwards, the floor was opened for the audience to ask Waller questions. Waller addressed inquiries about how the echo chamber of social media works as another wall and how cycles of disposition over generations makes it harder to break walls down.
When asked about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine and how the UConn community should navigate it, Waller stressed understanding the trauma on both sides.
“I don’t think we’re looking at competing traumas here to figure out which one is worse,” Waller said. “But we’re trying to understand how these traumas inform what’s happening currently, how they inform our understanding and how we can respond.”
After the lecture, Samari Adan-Cabanas, an eighth-semester mechanical engineering student, reflected on how walls can negatively affect those who made them.
“When we build walls, it’s to keep the ‘others’ out of there, but we also kind of harm ourselves too when we build those things,” Adan-Cabanas said. “We don’t really get to interact with other people, and I hadn’t thought of that before, how we would be harming people inside, too.”