The Paradox of Ubiquitous Fortification

Derek S. Denman starts his study of fortification with a contradiction that is at once hopeful and horrifying. The “paradox of power” here is that the very presence of the fortress “disclose[s] a condition of existential insecurity” (1). Denman quotes from the novel Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, highlighting for readers that it is “often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity” (1). These massive things of stone and engineering—these monumental projects—are also projections both psychological and cultural. This “tension within military architecture,” writes Denman, “suggests a deeper cultural and philosophical contradiction” involving not just the “elusive” goal of fortification but the “futility of these efforts” that remains apparent as the “desire to fortify only grows and proliferates” in our globalized world (2). Denman highlights—speaking specifically about the star-shaped fortress at Terezín in the Czech Republic but clearly of wide application—how the space of the fortress has been reappropriated for multiple purposes. He underscores transformation of the fortress from its initial construction as a military fortification designed for protection, to a prison, to a concentration camp where people were put to death by execution—all different though linked versions of incarceration and isolation. What Denman calls “fortress power” and focuses on throughout his study is a “form of power seeking mastery over the world through containment, selective enclosure, and the modulation of movement” and, he is quick to add, remains “divided against itself,” a “fantasy of sovereign power” (2–3). Fortress Power seeks to trace the “genealogy of fortification, following the elements of military architecture and defensive design as they are adapted from war zones and battlefields to political technologies of partitioning space and governing mobility” (3). In doing so, Denman emphasizes how “fortification gives material form to an anticipatory posture, rehearsing a condition of siege.” He continues,

This book reveals how this “defensive” siege footing wages war by other means, attempting to partition, atomize, and individualize at a moment when relationality, transnational solidarity, and collective action are essential. Fortress power seeks to preempt or even deactivate the agonism and sociality integral to democratic life. (4)

The horrifying part is not just that the expansive logic of fortification places a stranglehold on democracy and attempts to squeeze and is squeezing, and it is not just what this portends for the future: the increasingly stratified and separated classes of humankind. The horrifying part is not just that defensive postures—siege and fortification construction—not only threaten to but in fact result in the offensive expansion of warfare, power, and domination. The horrifying part is that this is already a widespread condition of the present and is, in fact, the evolving background of our contemporary social arrangement whose foremost weapon seems to be logistical in nature. For Denman, the “condition of liquid modernity is fundamentally one of overcoming fortification” (5). Here we might consider the postmodern (de)emphasis on space—the sense, put in Denman’s words, that “space itself is slipping away” and where barriers seems “completely expunged from political life” (5)—and the realities of globalization to say that we are all, to one degree or another, contained, even imprisoned, within a series of concentric circles imposed (and composed) by the materiality of our culture whose consistent solidification increases the disparities in global power, wealth, and destitution.

The hopeful part, and I’ll return to this later, is the utopian potential of the self-defeating eventuality of fortification. While Denman’s first three chapters trace the development and expansion of fortification, the fourth and final chapter offers potential methods of resistance by which the logic of fortification can be opposed. Overall, Denman’s book articulates three connected themes. The first is the “incompleteness of the fortress and inability to provide the security it promises” (16), the initial contradiction at the heart of security, which can never be fully guaranteed or established and which has fear, dread, and insecurity haunting it at every moment. The second theme, which Denman develops while covering a long period of time, is the “increasing mobility, diffusion, and temporariness of fortification” (16) as we move from the premodern and modern past to the globalized or postmodern present with its intensification of the technologies of spatial control and surveillance. The third theme, as the fortress expands to fit the boundaries of society and then the world, is its “influence on governing those ‘inside’ fortresses” (16). The pathway connecting these themes in the book, Denman points out, is not a “teleological shift from war-making to pacified governance, but instead a series of complex webs and feedback loops by which martial design is further inscribed in political space” (16). Fortress power involves the “recursive accumulation of power” by “any available means” (16). Invoking Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham and the panopticon, Denman explains how the diagram—a thing containing principles in abstraction which he contrasts to the blueprint—of the fortress “conveys a number of organizing procedures for political space,” which extend to the prison, the hospital, the school, the workhouse and which extend into the entirety of the cityscape and, eventually, across society at large (15). It would not be altogether inappropriate or unexpected, then, to invoke the often quoted Jorge Luis Borges tale about cartography called “On Exactitude in Science” and to reproduce it in its entirety. Not only because the story displays all three of Denman’s thematic concerns but also because it indicates a desire for the fortress, for completely circumscribed security and precision (to see all, to surveil all, to know all) and gestures toward its utopian abolition:­­

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winter. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the disciplines of Geography.

—Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658 (Borges, 325)

Not only do we see that the aspiration to map everything is an enterprise destined for ruins, but we can also detect Denman’s three interrelated themes reflected in the story: like the obsessive, imperial sweep of cartography depicted here, complete fortification is an untenable project; like the map from the story, fortress power, while large, is temporary and falls apart; and like the empire itself, totalitarian fortification is not going to be able to successfully achieve its aims. When the fortress fits the world, it will have to become something else. However, we may not want to wait until this happens. Read in this context of fortification, Borges’ story may come as a hopeful relief.

As mentioned, Denman’s first three chapters focus on the expanding power of fortification and its logic, the increasing dominance over logistics and spatial movement, and the defensive rationale that easily turns out to be offensive and aggressive. From fortification and defense as the foundation of the city (chapter 1), to the incursion of the logic of fortification into the cityscape itself via hostile architecture (chapter 2), to its presence on the borderlands where the landscape is utilized as a weapon (chapter 3), Denman charts how the hegemonic growth of fortification seeks to control the mobility of people and supplies, to control, in short, the very spatial form of life. Apropos, an executive order has recently (September 2025) been issued renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War, another indication and unmasking of the offensive and expansive nature of fortification and security. Denman’s final chapter (chapter 4) presents his intervention. As he puts it, the first three chapters “follow the ferocious architectures of fortification” while the final chapter “examines the counterhegemonic use of stoppages and obstructions that aim to disrupt imperial power, war-making, and logistical networks of capitalism” (19).

Building on Paul Virilio’s work on urban history, Denman begins his first chapter pointing out that “war organizes space through fortifications, and fortifications bring about the birth of cities” (21). The city is a thing of war. And it is initially organized by the fortifications that will attempt to protect it. Looking at the early modern bastion fortress, Denman seeks to examine the “enduring effects” of fortress design for the “contemporary political technologies of seeing, securing, and governing” (21). The star-shaped bastion fortress (trace italienne) which “becomes the symbol of defense against artillery” in the early modern period shows how “fortification begins to shift from a logic of immobilization and exclusion toward the biopolitical management of circulations” (22). Rather than simply restricting movement, the fortress and its designs, its effects on the environment, “modulated mobility” and enabled “certain movements while inhibiting others” (24). Referencing the works of Albrecht Dürer, Niccolò Tartaglia, and Galileo Galilei among other writers from the 1500s, Denman demonstrates how fortification becomes a “form of knowledge on the way to the domain of philosophy” and “delineates and secures the hierarchy of forms of knowledge” (28). Then, fortification “takes on a privileged role as the means by which to defend an existing order of power/knowledge” (28). It places the status quo power structures at the center of defense: as on one hand that which requires protection and preservation because of its centrality in the culture (which will involve a ruling structure); as on the other hand that which is maintained by force and subversion and that which is under attack (which will involve a ruling structure). The contradiction again in view, Denman elevates Machiavelli as a contemporary perceiver of the paradox of fortress power:

While much of the writing at this time praised fortification as a solution to the problem of military defense and saw within fortress design potentials for political utopia, Machiavelli offered a dissenting view focused on the perils of political power that came with fortress construction. For Machiavelli, the fortress embodied a privatization of power wherein the personal interests of an aristocratic or princely class triumphed over the pursuit of a durable republic . . . He was concerned that, at its best, the fortress might eclipse the importance of political bounds between citizens to defend the polity, and at its worst, it might become a weapon of tyrants invested in personal gain over the survival of the city-state. (30)

Thus, the “construction of a fortress to control the people signals a failure of government” (30). Synthesizing the twentieth chapter of The Prince, Denman writes that the “prince who does not fear his people can do without fortresses, as they will only stoke popular resentment” while the “prince who is afraid of his people will build fortresses to guard against them, even as this will likely be his undoing” (31). In what sounds like a general description of the contemporary, wealth-divided world, Denman on Machiavelli’s attitude: “Elites who retreat to fortresses either rely on force to govern, stoking the hatred of the people through their acts of repression, or govern without prudence, lacking the caution to account for popular will” (31).

Indeed, the intensity of privatization we witness today is one of the enduring effects of fortress logic, and Denman connects these early modern links with our contemporary postmodern, globalized situation. If “early modern fortification constituted an effort, unprecedented at its time, to channel and direct mobility” (47), then contemporary fortification has adapted the same expansive logic—the same intentional diagram—with the attempt to anticipate and wage “everywhere war” (49–50). Denman mentions how ramparts give way to radar, how fortresses both protective and offensive take to the sky—the B-29 Superfortress, the B-52 Stratofortress—and how aerial control is established beyond the confines of an enclosed fortress. The drastic expansion of drone warfare is another testament to this control of and from the sky. And with battleships prepared to be promptly at any location on earth, the sea is also included here. As a response to patrolled and surveilled skies, “hardened bunkers” become another kind of contemporary fortification: Denman lists NORAD, Raven Rock, and Mount Weather as sites that “offer hardened shelters designed to preserve government functioning during a nuclear attack” (55), but he also covers the “privatized bunker construction” often commissioned by the wealthy “ranging from the fallout shelter to the personal panic room” in an attempt to “capitalize on the threat of pandemic, environmental crisis, global war, and other apocalypse scenarios” (55). This signals more retreat from collective life. These often successful “fear-driven grifts” are emblematic of more problematic and “larger transformations between states and citizens” because, as Denman concisely puts it, such Cold War “plans privileging the survival of a political elite amount to a state’s abandonment of citizens to a personal civil defense” (55). The existence of privatization is a form of “social-contract failure architecture” attesting to “state withdrawal and abandonment in late neoliberalism” (56). If such fortifications are “not yet open war” they are a “process of anticipatory action” that pursues “war by other means” (60–1).

Denman’s second chapter, then, details how such defensive fortifications have seeped into and spread throughout the modern city. He mentions the architectural features of such cities that produce and reinforce “social exclusion,” such as anti-homeless benches, gates surrounding public and residential buildings, and the enclosure of common space, all to demonstrate a “concern about the collapse of democratic life” (63–4). The contemporary fortress city is “composed not only of citadels within the larger cityscape but also by the transformation of the urban fabric into the medium of fortified design” (65). Again, with privatization, the deemphasis on common space and of commonwealth along with the increase of urban fortification, the normalization of defensive postures can easily be recognized. As Denman writes, despite its “utopian vision of practical livability, modernism had not delivered on its progressive promise” and had “instead become the medium of segregating life in cities” (69). In the urban world, postmodernism—globalization—has only intensified this propensity for separation and fortification. And a “future of urban fortification would not be a democratic future,” Denman tells us (69). This future, which we see continuing to unfold around us, is one where a “subject must be induced to take responsibility for their own action” (76). To strengthen this linking of neoliberalism and doctrines concerning defensible space, Denman borrows from the work of Wendy Brown and considers how, under capitalist modernity, each individual comes to be some kind of self-protecting entrepreneur, which further erodes the sense of the collective. Describing the nexus of neoliberalism and defense doctrine, Denman writes,

Freedom comes to mean something closer to consumer choice, and democratic equality is repudiated in favor of the inequalities essential to market functioning. Despite espousing the dissolution of barriers, neoliberalism in fact relies on selective boundaries and regulations on movement to protect the operation of markets (75).

As should already be clear by now, it is not merely the architectural or spatial world that is fortified. The economic, the social, and the coordinates of ideology are influenced by so many iterations of fortification and all of its contradictions.

Denman returns all the way to 1604, to Sir Edward Coke for the early foundations of what we call “castle doctrine” or “stand your ground” laws in the United States. This involves, enunciating the paradox of power again, the “individual capacities for violence” to “respond to felt insecurities” (87). The felt part is, of course, worth emphasis, as, for instance, the “era of widespread gun ownership can be read as a manifestation of a desire for elusive sovereignty, wherein the gun embodies the sovereign capacity for lethal force” (87). In this way, every self becomes a moving castle, a mobile fortress in need of defense everywhere it travels. From the built environment to the individual ideologies promoted by neoliberalism and globalization, the fortress city consists of “overlapping and reinforcing techniques of planning, architecture, and policing;” the fortress city is a “node within the logistical system of capitalist circulation” (93). One can see how the “promise of defense entrenches inequality, restricts mobility, and propels dispossession” (95): it is through the separation of the commons, the endless emphasis on individual—on property, on self, on dubious ideas of freedom and agency—that the fortress city situates itself against democratic values.

While the first two chapters of Denman’s study examine sites of the physical fortress and the city that surrounds it, the third chapter looks to a more (at least at first appearance) ambiguous terrain of fortifications: borderlands and outskirts, those apparently open and wide areas between one fortress and another, between nations. These, too, serve as offensive fortification. Despite their appearance as a form of nature, the borderlands and its hostile terrain are enlisted in the defensive and violent efforts of nation-states. As Denman puts it, when it “comes to deaths at the border, nature is paradoxically both mere background and volatile weapon, pure inevitability and intense dynamism” (98). Denman cites the deniability that governments enjoy when migrants, traveling by land or sea, die as a result of their movements, often in flight away from other forms of violence. Arguing for a greater attention to nature and borderlands as a means of fortification, Denman details how the desert and the sea can be understood as weapons of fortification deployed against perceived threats to the nation-state. He aims to renaturalize the border, considering how “border-making draws on the material forces of land and sea in order to police the mobility and deny the grievability of migrant deaths” (99). The borderscape is, after all, an “extended space of the border, an entire landscape composed of social relations and material inscriptions” and is not merely inert earth (104). It is a site on which the global relations of capitalism and the logic of fortification also play out.

Thus, Denman traces how such factors of the physical geography are “conscripted as weapons of a security apparatus” (107). Calling on us to recall the function of frontier spaces via the famous Frederick Jackson Turner thesis—that release valve for the nation, that contradictory projection of the republic—Denman again puts on display the paradox of power:

The nature invoked in relation to the frontier is one that provides the conditions of its own overcoming. It is not an uninhabited space, even if it may be represented as such by state officials. Settler violence and colonial warfare extend the territory of the frontier. To declare it a natural barrier effaces and disavows the violence at work in boundary-making along frontiers. Moreover, the suggestion that it is a barrier by nature is betrayed by the animal life and ecological systems that regularly traverse this boundary. (155)

As already mentioned, the ability to blame nature for the deaths of migrants on land and at sea is one result of presenting the borderscape as separate and independent from the intentional, fortified designs of the city or the biopolitical arrangement of globalized capitalism. Denman points out how such arrangements enable the acceptability of death and violence. Quoting Virilio—to “invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck”—Denman underscores how the subsequent catastrophes or accidents are “accepted as part of the social and political order, even perhaps constitutive of the existing configuration of power” (122). He points to those “shipwrecks that occur regularly in the Mediterranean as vessels with migrants attempt to cross the sea” as one such example (122). Denman concludes this chapter by engaging with biopolitics and necropower and places his focus on the “material environments that make a boarder deadlier, the wager being that the ensemble of border fortifications that compose a lethal landscape” allow us to track the contemporary trends of violence (125). As he does with most other key scholars throughout his study, following and building on and applying their work, Denman engages “sympathetically and constructively” here with the work of Achille Mbembe and more broadly with that of Foucault (123). With these three chapters, Denman demonstrates that fortification is everywhere, that its logic is at the foundation of modernity itself, and that an examination of the fortress in both its ideological and material elements reveals it to be utterly inseparable from its relation to power, control, and containment that mark so much of western civilization. He also shows the degree to which fortification opposes itself to democracy.

Before getting to Denman’s final chapter and his recommendations for resisting fortification and the walling off of democratic possibilities, I will register two points: the first involves the utopian potential and contradictions that I have been trying to emphasize so far; and the second is a consideration of his brief engagement with and framing of Giorgio Agamben’s work in relation to his own and, indeed, to the wider implications of the kind of spaces we occupy in our contemporary, globalized world. I said at the opening of this review that the contradictory prospect of fortification, the one that Denman centers, the very paradox of power, is the means by which its own impossibility and insecurity are revealed. In going through these chapters of Fortress Power, I have tried to draw out points where Denman puts this paradox on display. At its very base, the drive for security betrays the vulnerability of the human being, both body and mind. We are exposed to one another, to the potential of violence, and to the uncertainty of the environment. The utopian impulse arises with the recognition not only that dissatisfaction exists in the present but that the future can be different, rendered in some fashion otherwise. The dream of the fortification is that it can mitigate this aforementioned exposure to violence and uncertainty. This remains the hopeful side of fortification and security. As we have seen, the horrifying part entails the control of logistical forces, the deployment of extreme forms of governmentality, and the departure from democratic modes of community in favor of more authoritarian, even individualist, kinds of infrastructure and ideology. As we can see, the utopian potential of so many possible outcomes seems to have been appropriated more by dystopian forces. The hopeful potential of security has given way in globalization to the increasingly stratified, antagonistic, and contradictory power systems whereby groups are separated and exploited, channeled and utilized, for the logistical health of fortress capitalism. Politics is, after all, the establishment of norms and the separation of groups. These separations are often conducted forcefully, through architecture, logistics, and so many other methods of bodily coercion both explicit and implicit. How they are to be resisted, then, becomes a central concern and an enduring problem. If not the wholesale inversion of fortress power, the transformation of its infrastructure for the health of the commons—whatever this might look like—and the extent to which it is possible becomes an abiding question. And what methods—radically new or traditionally expected—might be put into practice?

Denman makes an effort to distinguish his work from that seminal study by Agamben Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. In a paragraph signaling his departure from Agamben’s concern over the camp as the “biopolitical nomos of the planet,” Denman acknowledges the major points of convergence between fortification and the camp as Agamben sees it but posits that Agamben “often seems trapped by the contradictions he observes, finding the paradoxical structure of sovereignty in seemingly every political relation and seeing all modern political space as on the path to becoming the camp” (16). Denman offers that the “paradigmatic quality of the camp leaves little room for the analysis of other spatial logics and practices” citing the occlusion of the “material space of the fortress, the disciplinary spaces of factories and prisoners, the necropolitical space of the colony, and the overlap of these different techniques of spatial control” (17). Not only can we identify each of these spaces listed already within the camp—it was a prison and a fortress, a factory, a colony, and a bio- and necropolitical death machine—but we can see the camp, like the concentric rings of fortification, federated everywhere and intersecting not only in the physical geography but in the ideological realm as well. And although it is not merely the demonstration of the “production of bare life,” Denman is right to highlight the “struggles at each of these sites” (17). However, it is not that all modern political space is on the way to becoming the camp, but that modern political space already constitutes the camp. The camp, as Agamben has it, is paradigmatic, and is already also diagrammatic: a space that repeats itself and intersects with all other sectors of globalized society. This is the horror that I spoke of at the opening of this review, the expansive eventuality of fortification that Denman has traced. Agamben is more fundamentally useful for understanding the continuum upon which all our institutions and iterations of power rest.

Denman’s final chapter seeks to ask how “we might reroute and transform the logic of fortification to enlist blockages and acts of obstruction in the service of radical democratic politics” (132). How might such hostile forms of control, restriction, and governance be resisted? Denman’s answer is to interrupt circulation. Such blockages, obstructions, and interruptions, for Denman, provide spaces in which a view of a democratic future might arise. While he does acknowledge that democracy might require its own fortifications if it is to survive, and while he acknowledges the “oft-repeated critique of radical democracy” that it “has no institutions” and therefore “lacks durable political organization,” Denman opts to argue that the “barricade” and its articulation in the “circulation struggle” is an “institution of radical democracy” (132–4). He posits “democratic fortitude” as an ethos against fortress power (134). Because the barricade “involves gathering and assembly” and offers “new articulations of the demos at the heart of democratic politics” it presents, for Denman, a vision of “radical equality” (134). This is, so to speak, Denman’s intervention. Denman speaks of collective self-defense, protection for the commons, the nonviolent blurring of the lines between violence and the language of warfare, and of “protection from below” that “starts from a place of providing for essential needs, rendering care, and reducing the capacities of the state and private violence” (155)—things the state itself should be tasked with accomplishing. Denman lauds democratic fortitude, which “wields a counterlogistics” that can help political equality (159). I only wonder how logistics and counterlogistics operate in tandem with one another, how the ostensibly and optically democratic forms of resistance highlighted here might be also a kind of input for the hegemonic institutions of circulation, a means to smooth the gears of capitalism, an instance in which the opposition feeds the very antagonist against which it struggles.

In his conclusion, musing on the future of a fortified planet, Denman considers science fiction, as many do, as one site wherein we might read the consequences of contemporary developments writ large. He also presents a number of factors—extremism, particularly the far-right neo-fascist, ultranationalist (though international) variety, and the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance—as markers of greater insulation, isolation, and polarization. Privatization, as I have already highlighted, is in the background of all of this, and one need not comment much about the increased prevalence of technology to have also contributed to such an atmosphere. Indeed, “fortification is a way of sidestepping collective endeavors” and “opting for the seeming ease of containment over the perceived difficulty of transformative politics” (170). Denman imagines a “possible future” where the “fortress might begin to recede from view,” a “world of solidarity and internationalism” where the “joyousness of finding social bonds anew” prospers amid communal luxury (175). I will not be the first to suggest that we need more than hopefulness and protests to countermand the forces of globalized capitalism, and I have already warned that such activities alone might even help to fill its coffers, grease the gears of its machinery, and refine its strategies. Fortress Power, Denman writes, is “never quite utopian” but instead remains “oriented toward democratic fortitude” (174). A utopian orientation might be appropriative rather than oppositional or interruptive, focusing on how the fortress and its logistical arrangements can be put to the work of the polis and the people whose vitality permits it to exist.