The Politics of Mapping. Bernard Debarbieux

SH2_12 GIS, spatial analysis; big data in political, geographical and legal studies

      Introduction

       Bernard DEBARBIEUX and Irène HIRT

       University of Geneva, Switzerland

I.1. Theoretical and conceptual debates

      The focus on the relationship between mapping¹, on the one hand, and politics or power, on the other hand, is certainly not new, or even recent. For centuries, particularly in the Christian, Chinese and Arab-Muslim worlds, the people who commissioned maps (princes, ministers or heads of state) and the cartographers clearly believed that maps must, first and foremost, serve the objectives of knowledge and the control of territories by sovereigns, armies and state administrations.

In the Western world, the proximity between maps and political power became less visible around the 18th century, when the discourse among cartographers began to focus on the techniques of production, the accuracy of the representation and the scientific value of the knowledge produced. This shift became even more pronounced in the 20th century when the scientific analysis of the map corpus and reflection on map production itself became essentially guided by a belief in the progress of techniques and knowledge. This led to the triumph of verism in the representation of the Earth’s surface, accuracy in the representation of data and optimization in the communication of knowledge. This threefold objective was achieved through the increasing sophistication of modern societies, techniques and policies. A few key figures in cartographic thinking in the second half of the 20th century embodied this ambition. Among these figures, Bertin (1983 [1967]) reflected on the visual and semiological effectiveness of maps. However, from the 18th to the 20th centuries, this discourse on the efficiency of maps was often voiced by authors working directly or indirectly for political authorities, sometimes even within their institutions. The added value maps held for the exercise of power tended to escape critical reflection, since it became consubstantial with cartographic knowledge, on the one hand, and with government know-how, on the other hand.

      I.1.1. The “Harleyian turning point”

      The emergence of an alternative research program with this type of reflection as its objective can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s. Referred to as “critical cartography”, it is largely in line with the French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish approaches to the “social and political uses of maps”. This program proposes a critical interpretation of cartographic production in history, highlighting the socially constructed dimension of the map and its capacity to support strategies and relationships of power/knowledge as conceptualized by Michel Foucault. The break with the hitherto dominant approaches is remarkable. The main innovation of the 1970s and 1980s involved breaking away from the modernist and evolutionist narrative to question that which had been largely left out of the field of reflection, namely the political, but also social and contextual dimensions of cartographic commissioning and production. The historian of cartography Brian Harley emerged as a leading figure in this breakthrough (Blakemore and Harley 1980; Harley 1988a, pp. 277–312, 1988b, 2001). The publication of his article “Deconstructing the Map” (1989) had a major influence on thought about the “power of maps”. His work has become a classic despite its theoretical and methodological shortcomings, which are noted by even Harley’s greatest advocates, as Reuben Rose-Redwood (2015) pointed out in the special issue of the journal Cartographica published in 2015: “Deconstructing the Map: 25 years on”.

This turning point is all the more significant because Harley was followed by many authors who produced a significant body of empirical or theoretical analysis. Even today, his proposals continue to inspire researchers. Indeed, referring to the idea of “critical cartography” quickly became a standard, particularly in the English-speaking academic world, at a time when geographical analyses in terms of power relations and domination were also multiplying. From that moment on, the political dimension of critical cartography has tended to be emphasized (Crampton and Krygier 2006, p. 11). This has resulted in considerable and exciting academic output. Initially, this focused primarily on the role of mapping both in the history of modern state-building in Europe (Buisseret 1992; Kain and Baigent 1992) and colonial empires (Kain and Baigent 1992; Edney 1997; Blais 2014) – leading, in the process, to the negation of Indigenous peoples, especially in the Americas (Harley 1990, 1992) – as well as in the process of decolonization (Akerman 2017). However, it has also looked at the diffusion of the modern state model outside European colonies (Winichakul 1994).

      On the strength of these case studies and the constant enrichment of the field that has been made possible, critical cartography acquired significant visibility in the last two decades of the 20th century, thanks to a number of exhibitions² and critical works, including Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps (1992), Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps (1991), and the ambitious collection of volumes, The History of Cartography, launched in 1987 by Harley and David Woodward (1987), to which we will return later. Critical cartography has also become globalized through the translation of some of Harley’s texts³ and the publication of analyses made by authors whose approaches were similar to his⁴ but who write in languages other than English (e.g. Jacob 1992; Gugerli and Speich 2002; Valerio 2007). This visibility has enabled maps and mapping to occupy an important place in the work of major authors on the issues of nationalism (Anderson 2006 [1983]) and the state (Scott 1998), despite them being outside the field of critical cartography itself.

      However, this account of the critical and political turn taken by cartographic thinking, while bringing to light a very important moment in the history of mapping, which was stabilized by being endlessly revisited by academic production, is not fully satisfactory, nor is it complete. There are several reasons for this.

      I.1.2. Pluralism and taking perspectives further

      First of all, this narrative pays little attention to the reflections and work that preceded the “Harleyian turning point”. Throughout the 20th century, and well before the 1970s, geographers emphasized the use of maps for political purposes.

      Isaac Bowman, for example, director of the American Geographical Society and Chief Territorial Specialist, appointed by Woodrow Wilson to advise the American delegation to the Paris Conference in 1919, was astonished by the quantity of contradictory linguistic and ethnic maps placed on the negotiating table to decide the European borders in the aftermath of the First World War, each illustrating the claims of the states concerned (House and Seymour 1921; Smith 1984). In the aftermath of the Second World War, Hans Speier and a few others analyzed Nazi propaganda maps, showing the fundamentally rhetorical and persuasive nature of maps (Speier 1941)⁵. Finally, authors relying on Marxist theories, such as Yves Lacoste with the topographic map (Lacoste 1976), have endeavored to show how mapping has served the objectives of military, social or imperialist domination. In comparison with the production of previous decades, the “Harleyian turning point” can hardly be characterized by the mere (re-) discovery of the political nature of maps.

      Besides, this “turning point” is not characterized by a single problematization of the coupling between maps and politics nor by a stable body of theoretical references. It is true that Harley favored a critical interpretation of the map very early on; in doing so, he was concerned with placing it in its social context of production. However, at first, this interpretation was also mainly fed by Marxist theories and questioning (as in Harley 1988a, pp. 277–312). It was only gradually, under the influence of very different postmodern authors – Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (who we are still surprised to see grouped under the single banner of “French theory” in the English-speaking world) – that Harley called for a research program aimed at “deconstructing” (Harley 1989) the map, “denaturalizing” it in