In today's slideshow of ‘alternative geographies,’ we gently suggest that nothing about the geopolitical maps we use today is natural or inevitable. Our selection of maps make an entertaining case that they are indeed the product of human choices and that those choices can have policy-related consequences, for better as well as for worse. To access the full article, please visit us at: http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Special-Feature/Detail?lng=en&id=134600&contextid774=134600&contextid775=134588&tabid=134588

1. iMaax/flickr

2. One problem that modern cartographers cannot easily escape is
projecting a three-dimensional world on a flat surface. Every
solution to this problem distorts the face of the Earth in some
way. The most famous example is perhaps the Mercator
Projection, which flattens the polar regions and notoriously
inflates the sizes of Canada, Greenland and Antarctica. More
„naturalistic‟ alternatives include the Winkel III Projection, in
which distortions in direction, distance and area have been
minimized, and the Peters Projection, which now represents the
total area of the world‟s countries most accurately. (The U.S.
National Geographic Society, by the way, adopted the Winkel III
as its preferred projection 1998.)

3. A Mercator projection
Wikimedia Commons

4. A Winkel III projection
Wikimedia Commons

5. A Peters Projection
Perno.com

6. Political map of the world, 2001
Boston Public Library
Probably the most familiar of all contemporary world maps are the political ones,
including this representative example from 2001. They invariably divide the globe
into colored polygons that represent territorial states. As we discussed in
yesterday‟s lead article, students of critical geopolitics argue that representations
of the world like this one – which emphasize territorial states to the exclusion of
other actors – are a contributing factor to our collective failure to understand new
transnational threats and respond to them effectively.

7. Samuel Huntington‟s “Clash of Civilizations”
Wikimedia Commons
One of the most influential and, yes, controversial representations of world
geography that emerged in the uncertain political context immediately following
the Cold War depicted Samuel Huntington‟s Clash of Civilizations thesis. As
shown here, Huntington divided the world into eight major „civilizations‟:
Western, Slavic, Latin American, Islamic, African, Indic, Sinic, and Japonic. He
famously argued that international cooperation would be more likely within the
same civilization and conflict more likely at the „fault lines‟ between civilizations.

8. The Dystopian Geography of George Orwell’s 1984
Southern Cross University
Another famous representation of world geography appeared in George
Orwell‟s 1984, where three monolithic political blocs (or World Islands)
perpetually warred against each other.

9. The earth following a polar ice melt
Kevin Gill/flickr
Speaking of dystopia, here is a depiction of what the world might eventually
look like after the melting of the polar ice caps. The submerged areas include
some of the most densely populated and developed regions in the world: the
Eastern seaboard of the United States, Northern Europe and Eastern China.

10. Thomas Barnett‟s “Core” and “Gap”
eaves.ca
This map depicts Thomas Barnett‟s geopolitical vision of a world with a
prosperous, „progressive‟ and politically integrated “core” and a comparatively
undeveloped, deprived and politically disconnected “gap.” Integrating the gap as
much as possible with the core is the ultimate objective in this classically
informed view of geopolitics.

11. The Earth at Night
NASA
A complementary, less either/or depiction of Barnett‟s core and gap
construct appears here. The picture contrasts the illuminated (e.g., more
developed) areas in the Global North with the large swathes of South
America, Africa, and Central Asia that remain in darkness.

12. World map of activity on Flickr and Twitter
Eric Fischer/flickr
And yet another variation on Barnett‟s construct, although this one is more
stark than his map. The red dots are the locations of Flickr pictures, the blue
dots are the locations of Twitter tweets, and the white dots are locations that
have been posted to both. Basically, the last three slides show that the core-
gap construct is actually uneven when it comes to different forms of
development.

13. The World, Based on Military Spending – A Neo-Realist View?
Worldmapper
Represented here – by way of a cartogram – is the world based on military
spending. (In this case, the spending includes the costs of military personnel,
including recruitment and training, supplies, weapons and equipment, and
construction.) Since military spending is often used as a proxy for a state‟s
„hard power,‟ does this map and the next one approximate a genuinely „neo-
realist‟ picture of the world?

14. The global arms trade
Arms exports
Arms imports
Worldmapper

15. 1 AD 1500 AD
1960 AD 2015 AD
Worldmapper
This series of cartograms illustrates the national incomes of different parts of the
world in the years specified. Evidence of the „great divergence‟ can be seen
between 1500 and 1960, but are we now seeing a great re-convergence?

16. An Alternative Middle East?
Armed Forces Journal

17. An Alternative Middle East?
Much like the three previous maps, this one goes to the heart of critical
geopolitical critiques on the opportunities and dangers of geospatial
representation. It shows what the Middle East theoretically could look like if the
region‟s political borders, drawn by geometrically-minded 19th and early 20th
century colonialists, actually reflected its ethnic and religious realities. Maps
such as these are often highly controversial and politically charged, especially
in the eyes of those who want to maintain various forms of the status quo. By
showing that representation can treat political “reality” in different ways, maps
such as these are not politically neutral, at least in the eyes of those who
harbor, believe in, and promote alternative forms of representation that reject
cartographic experiments such as this one.

18. An Alternative North America?
Wikimedia Commons
There is no shortage of maps showing alternative future representations of
North America. One of the most famous is Joel Garreau' s the Nine Nations of
North America (1981)

19. An Alternative United States?
The Wallstreet Journal
For more than a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting
the breakup of the United States. Economic and moral collapse, he argues (or
is that hopes?), will trigger civil war, which will be the invitation for foreign
powers (including Canada and Mexico) to cut the country up into six pieces.
This map depicts the envisioned results.

20. The world according to Standard Oil, 1940
Boston Public Library
Lest we forget, geospatial representations are not the sole domain of official or
quasi-official bodies. Non-government and private actors have their own highly
subjective view of the world too, and they might not be particularly recent either.

21. Critical Geopolitics – A Closing Reminder
As noted in yesterday‟s lead article: “Because
the geography of the world is too vast and
complex to grasp all at once, representations
of geography – rather than geography itself –
are what actually shape a state‟s foreign
policy, or so students of critical geopolitics
argue. These representations, in turn,
inevitably distort or obscure what they
represent, which make it critically important to
pay close attention to this process. Indeed,
the requirement is not only to prevent these
distortions from misleading us about what
policies to pursue in practice, but also to
make explicit moral or aesthetic choices about
how exactly to represent geography
ourselves.”
On an unrelated note: this Chinese map from the
mid 19th century is a map of the world. If you look
Boston Public Library carefully, you can make out Europe and the
United States – squeezed into the top-left corner