2. Critical Approaches

Lacoste acknowledges that Eratosthenes coined the term ‘geography’ but regards Herodotus as not only the first geographer, but also as a great geographer.

See Harvey (1974) for a brief discussion of Pinochet’s geography.

Who, in 2002, founded the Institut Français de Géopolitique at the University Paris-VIII.

‘The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his kind: Beware of listening to this impostor; You are lost if you forget that the fruits are everyone’s and the Earth no one’s’ (Rousseau 1755, II.i).

A ‘Westphalian’ map is perhaps a better description. The line in the sand between Saudi Arabia and Yemen was ‘made real’ by the 341 concrete border markers driven 30 metres into the ground between April 1991 and March 1996 (Blake 2000, 5). These can be said to be quite literally Westphalian: the company which installed them, Hansa Luftbild, is headquartered in Münster, which is in North Rhine-Westphalia. The map, like many other ‘political’ maps draws on a single, misrepresentative, understanding of the state, its borders, and territorial sovereignty.

Or, potentially, infinitely more, if the border is anything but perfectly straight. The length of the border increases as the unit used to measure it decreases: see Richardson (1961) and the subsequent discussion in Mandelbrot (1967) from which he went on later to develop the idea of fractals.

It is important to study these, as they are often overlooked in analyses. Blake (2000) points out that ‘neutral zones, condominiums, no-fly zones, buffer zones and shared zones at sea… deserve more attention than they receive from political geographers. In all these entities, the authority of the state is restricted in certain respects’ (Blake 2000, 10).

The neutral zone is commonly represented this way on western maps during the twentieth and indeed twenty-first centuries. Its history is complex and its long presence on western maps is partly due to the reluctance of the two countries at various points to lodge the border agreement with the United Nations. Indeed, the 1982 treaty, lodged with the UN in 1991, is itself curious; the first coordinate pair mentioned in the agreed minutes to the treaty is well outside the territory of Iraq.

For more on Westphalia and the evolution of borders, see Pickering (2014); see also Pickering (2012) on the difficulties in capturing border changes in a data set.

It should be noted, though that in some instances, even mountains are not readily identifiable. See Pickering (2011) for a theoretical discussion and Pickering (2016) for a technical solution to this issue.

Consider Harley’s ‘tricks of the cartographic trade’: ‘size of symbol, thickness of line, height of lettering, hatching and shading, the addition of color’ (Harley 1989, 7).

The idea that computer maps change human thinking is an important issue of direct relevance to conflict research. In a piece entitled ‘GIS [Global Information Systems] as a tool for territorial negotiations,’ Wood (2000) points out how ‘[d]uring the Dayton Peace negotiations in the Fall of 1995, the US Army Topographic Engineering Center and the US Defense Mapping Agency (later to become the National Imagery and Mapping Agency) contributed over 100,000 map sheets, as well as the impressive on-site capability to digitise and display numerous data layers over war-ravaged Bosnia and Herzegovina. Real time manipulation of imagery and digital elevation data, plus quick turn around production of proposed territorial divisions and buffers were critical to achieving the goal of an agreed-upon inter-entity boundary line. Of particular note was the use of terrain visualisation software and remote sensing imagery with varied resolutions that allowed negotiators to virtually “fly through” areas to be partitioned’ (Wood 2000, 76). Computer maps tend to be binary; they offer little capacity for the notions of ‘fudged’ sovereignty discussed in Caspersen (2008). This will condition people’s thinking about possible conflict outcomes: modern computers and maps will tend to deliver Westphalian solutions.

For more information on why you should not do this, see the hugely entertaining How to lie with statistics (Huff 1954) and the equally enjoyable How to lie with maps (Monmonier 1991).

Such arguments even extend into the ‘ownership’ of outer space. While land is res nullius (owned by none) until someone claims sovereignty over it, Aron (1966) points out that the sea is res omnium: owned by all. He goes on to extend this argument into space: ‘The air, too, starting from a certain height, will belong to all because of satellites’ (Aron (1966, 208), emphasis in original). True enough. Indeed, a year after Aron’s publication, the second article of the Outer Space Treaty declared that outer space ‘is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of occupation, or by any other means.’ It would therefore seem that Westphalia does not apply in space. However, the Lockean labour-mixing argument does. Geo-stationary orbits are a finite commodity and satellites in this belt are, by their very nature, stationary, relative to the earth. Thus, they are akin to western notions of fixed agriculture. Satellites are separated by around 3000 kilometres. Allocation of space is determined by the WARC of the International Telecommunications Union (Fawcett 1984, 120). Their decisions are based essentially on a first-come first-served basis: use it or lose it (which explains why companies and states put non-functioning, temporary satellites into orbit while they finish their more complex versions: they are asserting ownership). Putting an object into such an orbit requires technologically advanced labour: therefore, while ‘sovereignty’ over such space may not be possible, the right of exclusive use based on a Lockean property principle is. For Mitrany, satellites and space travel were the ‘no man’s land of sovereignty. Sovereignty is nothing where it cannot be enforced’ (Mitrany 1966, 19). Yet Mitrany was writing before the USA and China started blowing up satellites. Perhaps such a ‘no man’s land’ was an existential threat to their personified understanding of sovereignty.

Nyroos (2001, 135) went so far as to coin the phrase ‘Tuathailian critical geopolitics.’ The phrase did not catch on.