A Beginner’s Geography Lesson
By: Haley Kynefin
Tags: Politics, Education, History, Geography, Maps

Image by Pascal Laurent from Pixabay

To further understand the world of power and narrative, we’re going to have to cover something that at first seems tangential: basic geography.

Geography seems obvious, like water to fish. It surrounds us always; it just is. We trace our lines of path and fate along its contours, and at times we don’t even notice how its contours shape us in turn. But the deep, slow-moving forms of the earth have dramatically molded the palm lines of history.

You’ve seen maps of the world before. There are hundreds, each charted from its own logic. No one map is “correct” or “incorrect”; rather, they are all different narratives of what the world looks like. Some focus on population; others on relative size of the continents; some highlight climate and ecology; others delineate the boundaries of empire. Each one tells its own story, and each story implicitly shapes the way we think about our universe.

Today, we’re going to look at one specific element of basic geography: the nation. How many nations are there, how are they scattered across this mess of continents we see on nearly every modern map, and what do the boundaries signify?

It might seem like a simple question to answer. There must be a concrete, and finite, number of nations. There is a finite allocation of land. But there’s a problem: not everyone agrees on how that land should be delineated, and into how many parts.

So, who gets to make the “official” list?

A Note on the United Nations

The most commonly used list of world states was defined by the United Nations. The United Nations recognizes 195 countries, 193 of which are members of the UN, and two of which are “observer states” — The Vatican and Palestine.

The UN is the world’s most complete organization for global governance. It was formed as the successor to the League of Nations in 1945, with the drafting of the UN Charter. The UN consists of six “principal organs”: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Secretariat, the International Court of Justice, and the Trusteeship Council. Underneath or related to these organs are a host of subsidiary offices, including the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and hundreds of others (2). Opinions differ as to the extent of the UN’s power and role as a true governance system; some argue that it holds little real authority because it lacks most of the functions of any actual government, and at any rate, it does not functionally override the sovereignty of its member states. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the “One World Government” conspiracy theory that claims the UN was formed precisely to override national sovereignty, and to subject the world to a single inescapable authority. There is a whole host of opinions in between. Later, I will discuss these ideas more in their own article. But for now, suffice it to say that, whether or not it can truly be considered a government institution in possession of authentic coercive power, the UN undoubtedly [1] wields appreciable global influence, and, [2] its member states comprise most of the inhabited surface area of the globe. For these reasons, I’ve chosen to use their geopolitical list.

But it’s important to keep in mind that this division is only one possible way in which we can see the world, and it reflects only one possible distribution of power. For maps are more than simply mirrors of the world as it exists; on the contrary, as cartographer and designer Denis Wood points out, they are actually propositions of a desired narrative. In their hearts, maps are an attempt not to describe reality as it is, but to insist that a specific version of reality is true. Maps will always leave out pieces of the truth, emphasize others, and distort others still. And whoever gets to decide on which parts are left out, emphasized or distorted wins power over the narrative of what reality looks like. That can be sizable power, indeed.

Wood argues that, in fact, the explosion of mapmaking practices from the 1500s onward helped to build and consolidate the modern nationstate and its power. We’ve already discussed how the first empires exercised only weak, loose control over their territories; but according to scholars like Michael Mann, it was not until very recently in history that states gained the tight control over their empires that we recognize today (3). In Russia, Japan, the early United States, China, France, Thailand and elsewhere, maps played a pivotal role in the processes of state-building, uniting disparate groups of people under a sense of common identity and helping rulers visualize the vast areas that “belonged” to them (4). Wood writes:

“From their inception it had been essential that states appear as facts of nature, as real enduring things, things like mountains; and at all costs to obscure their recent origins in violence and their tenuous holds on tomorrow. And maps were able to grant this precisely because maps too had been constructed as facts of nature: ‘We no more than show what exists,’ said the maps […] But then, this is what maps do, affirm the existence of the things on them. ‘This is here,’ maps say, ‘and that is there,’ as they do so simultaneously affirming the precedent existence of whatever is in question (the this, the state) and its location (the there, its borders).”

He’s not alone in this sentiment. Even the British geographer J. B. Harley observed, “To catalog the world is to appropriate it”. (5) Most cartography throughout history was funded and monopolized by builders of empire. And it makes sense, according to Wood’s logic. The king’s desired narrative is that he owns an expanse of territory. So why not draw it that way on the map? If he commissions such a sketch, the narrative becomes real. Not only does he see the shape of the landscape — the better to plan its defense — but it is labeled under his domain. His subjects, his military, his merchants and adventurers, all see the world through his eyes. But the map is just a mirror of what is! It’s hard to argue with the fact that its contours seem real. After all, you can follow them somewhere, can’t you?

The map was an instrument of state power, and as such it needed to be protected. Some empires, like the Japanese and the Portuguese, prohibited the transfer of maps or cartographic instruments to other states. The Spanish kept their trade routes secret and demanded the return of loaned charts when a ship’s captain returned from a voyage. The Soviet Union distorted its own maps in the hopes of confusing its enemies, altering coastlines, omitting scales of distance, and providing incorrect longitudes and latitudes.

But just as serious cartography bloomed first in the service of empire, maps can also be (and have been) used to conjure up fantasies, to rebel against existing systems and narratives, or to chart counter-realities. This map, for example, attempts to visualize the world from the perspective of indigenous peoples. These peoples are almost always invisible on any map, even though they were usually there before the nations whose borders chop up the globe like steak cuts on a cow’s body. In many cases, these borders were drawn within the last century. As a result, many of the indigenous people, who have sometimes inhabited the land for thousands of years, sprawl irreverently across frontiers. This can become a problem, leading to immigration and migration issues, the loss of citizenship and social benefits as borders are drawn and redrawn, and other hardships such as loss of access to sacred sites and resources. A map such as this one changes the narrative: it describes a different world, one in which sovereignty over land belongs to first peoples, rather than modern governments. It also describes territory as more fluid, since most of these people don’t use hard boundaries to mark the limits of their habitat. It shows us a different perspective, a different story, a different reality.

It’s important to understand the world from the perspective of those who make the rules — such as nationstates, and international governance organizations like the UN. These are the groups that have the lion’s share of the influence, that forge policies, that control the dominant conversation. But equally important is the ability to imagine other alternatives. What happens when we try to look at the map from a different perspective? What untold stories lurk in between the arbitrary lines and borders? The map tiles I’ve gathered here show the world as the UN sees it. But as you look them over, I encourage you to also try to see something different. Remember that this is not reality, it’s a story. And there is more than one possible story.

About the Map Tiles

The following visual aid shows the division of the world into 195 nationstates based on the way the UN has chosen to carve up the map. I decided to arrange the map tiles in alphabetical order by country name (in English). They are subcategorized by world region, and each region is presented in the historical order in which humans populated it. The UN observer states are listed separately at the end.

Why did I arrange them this way?

I wanted to help facilitate learning through mnemonics. By listing regions in the order that humans populated them, I hope to facilitate a rough visualization of historical human migration. I hope this will help you imagine the stories of the first humans as they discovered new landscapes and adventures, forging a history that has long since been erased. There is a storytelling mnemonic here. By grouping countries by region, I placed the world’s nations in bite-sized boxes — which will hopefully allow you to study and remember them a few at a time. This is a chunking mnemonic. By listing them in alphabetical order instead of by geographical location, I presented them in a way that you are unaccustomed to seeing them, thereby encouraging a fresh perspective. This is an emphasizing mnemonic, designed to make each country stand out as unique in your memory.

Learning Exercises

I encourage you to come back to this article a few times, to study these map tiles, and while you’re looking at them: to really think about what those lines on the page mean. Why does a country have the shape it has? Which other countries border it? What history might it have? Who lives there? What are its current politics? What resources can be found there? What does it export to your country? Do you know anyone from there? Which empires have occupied it? What is unique about its culture?…And so on. Try to do this for as many countries as you can, to help you develop an understanding of some of the less-well-known(to you) places, until they become more than a vague name, or perhaps a word you occasionally hear in the news. Use this as an educational resource. Print it out if you want to. Save the images by themselves and pin them to your wall, a few at a time, until you’ve cycled through all of them. Just because we all have Google Maps at our fingertips these days doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still take it upon ourselves to get intimately acquainted with the world map. Our world has been globalized, and there are implications. We should really take some time to get to know the whole wheel that spins our lives around.

If I could recommend a companion book for these exercises, it might be Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics.

Enjoy. Next time, we’ll be talking about the empires that have filled (and overspilled) these global lines throughout history, as we look deeper into the concept of “empire”, and what it truly means.