Our Walled World...The Guardian

Almost a quarter of a century after the Iron Curtain came down, the walls are going up again. In steel and concrete, with watchtowers and barbed wire, mankind is building separation barriers at a rate perhaps unequalled in history - at least 6,000 miles in the last decade alone, according to a Guardian analysis.

Now, in a unique project, Guardian journalists have visited 10 of the most controversial, striking, contested and extraordinary walls, from the US-Mexican border to the West Bank, and fromEurope’s eastern and southern frontiers to the divided cities ofHoms and Belfast. We have tried to establish why these new divisions are going up now, in an age when globalisation was supposed to tear the barriers down - particularly when, as history shows, walls rarely did what they set out to do.