In recent years, Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate and Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World have shown the popularity of this approach. Particularly revealing was a recent article that declared “the past two decades have uncomfortably proved perceptiveness” before adding, as a caveat, “ven if civilizations per se are not clashing.” The point, it seems, is that there’s definitely some clashing going on, and that’s all the vindication Huntington needs.įor some authors, maps ultimately seem less important for their content than as a symbol of humanity’s atavistic nature. Now, after a decade of bloodshed, Damascus seems poised to retake control of Syria. In 2017, for example, the Iraqi government crushed a formal bid for Kurdish independence. Yet while the post-Cold War world has indeed remained conflict-prone, the conflicts themselves have not followed the predictions of any one particular pessimist. Pessimists today see in the world’s ongoing conflicts and chaos evidence that these essentialist visions have been vindicated. In 2013, for example, one widely circulated map from the New York Times showed how Syria and Iraq might end up reconfigured on ethno-sectarian terms as four smaller, seemingly more homogeneous, states. Amid the chaos of Iraq’s civil war, some observers began to focus on the fault lines within Huntington’s category of Islamic civilization and concluded that it was, say, the tensions between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds that would ultimately prove insurmountable. Ironically, an equally essentialist view of human society inspired a series of completely contradictory maps imagining what the Middle East’s so-called real borders would look like. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, 1996. “The World of Civilizations: Post-1990,” map from Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, 1996. "The World of Civilizations: Post-1990,” map from Samuel P. Like maps of global risk or human development, the Freedom House map offers a ready metric for imagining Western politics and living standards spreading across the globe. Perhaps the best modern-day cartographic depiction of what liberal internationalism’s triumph might look like is Freedom House’s map of freedom in the world, with all the countries gradually ticking green. And, of course, the superpower conflict between Washington and Moscow would quickly reveal the United Nations’ limits as a mechanism for permanent peace through the unity of all nations.Īfter the Cold War ended, maps of peace and harmony proved far less visually engaging than their predecessors and were just as ideologically fraught. Indeed, after World War II, it became clear that many in the global south would reject America’s liberal internationalism as a neoimperialist attempt to sustain Western hegemony. These maps certainly convey the idea’s overly romantic side, while the careers of their creators capture its founding contradictions: Gill remains best known for his colorful cartographic propaganda for the British Empire, and Chase, by 1950, had pivoted to drawing starker red-and-white maps of the divided Cold War world. Observers today like to romanticize the post-World War II origins of the liberal international order. Leventhal Map Center/Boston Public Library Perhaps as a result, maps have served nicely as a metaphor for those who assumed conflict was more natural, or more interesting, all along.ġ944 Mercator map of the world united. At the same time, maps are ideally suited to essentialist visions of the world that, accurately or not, divide people into discrete, ready-to-clash units, each with their own color and territory. And it could sometimes look downright sinister to those on the wrong side of the map. Spreading peace and democracy has never been cartographically convincing, even to its promoters. How did we get here? One problem is that the pessimists had better maps. A steady stream of think pieces about the return of history, resurgence of nationalism, and reemergence of great-power competition all herald what might be called the rise of Risk geopolitics. Liberal internationalist optimism about the worldwide triumph of peace and democracy may have died long ago, but proclaiming its death is now more popular than ever. American punditry has entered a new phase of post-Cold War pessimism.
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