It is evident that over the last two decades we have been faced with numerous constructions of border security walls, although expectations at the end of the Cold War were quite different. We anticipated that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, such policies would fade into history, yet this did not happen. This master's thesis examines the phenomenon of security walls and their relationship to the contemporary security discourse. We focused on the gap between the increasing occurrence of walls and their effectiveness in solving security challenges. While in the past, walls addressed primarily territorial issues due to armed conflicts, our research found that the main reasons for construction in the 21st century include terrorism and increase in migration. The securitization of the latter implies that migrants, who could one day represent a security threat, have become the guiding principle of the wall policy. By analyzing historical and contemporary examples of walls, complemented by a comparative study of five cases (the USA, Israel, Spain, Hungary and Slovenia), we attempted to determine what really drives countries to build such barriers today and what their effects are. The research concludes that security walls in the 21st century do not solve the root causes of conflict and migration but often serve symbolic and political functions. Their effectiveness in reducing threats is questionable due to the discourse in the relationship between migrants and security, and due to the extremely high construction and upgrading costs. In addition, the policy of the wall forces migrants to seek ever more dangerous routes, which increases the number of deaths.
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