Borders have never been linear: moving beyond the borderline map trap in political cartography

Rodrigo Bueno Lacy and Henk van Houtum

Chapter 5 in Border Studies, 2025, pp 85-105 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In this contribution, we analyze the continuous lines that constitute the hegemonic cartographic visualization of national boundaries. Although most of us have grown used to regard the neat lines separating nation-states as the taken-for-granted background of world maps, we argue that this pervasive state-centric template of political cartography is fallacious, for no political boundary on Earth can be reduced to such a simplistic geometry. Yet, the reticule that these borderlines cast on the ‘blank map’ of political cartography has become the canonical lens through which world politics are seen, and thus the foundation of geopolitical analysis and statecraft. We contend that such mindless reliance on this warped yet unchallenged cartopolitical infrastructure – i.e., a synoptic worldview restricted by a grid of national boundaries, which we call border linearity – sustains a hyperreality (an ‘impostor reality’) that traps geopolitical thinking in the nation-state's box. The resulting borderline map distorts world politics by misrepresenting nation-states as though they were humanity's main actors: as if political organizations no older than the 18th century were spatially essential, historically immutable, and socio-economically, demographically and culturally autonomous entities – the cartographic crystallization of what John Agnew called the ‘territorial trap’. The colossal yet disregarded influence that such a map-inspired worldview exerts on geopolitics is what we term the borderline map trap: an unquestioned discursive convention that narrates, represents, and reacts to geopolitical phenomena as though they were best explained by reference to ‘commonsensical’ national boundaries. We contend that borderlines are but one among endless ways to see the world, yet perhaps the most deceiving and harmful, for their visual hegemony promotes a dehistoricized, depoliticized, and ultimately erroneous picture of global geopolitics. We conclude with a plea for an iconological turn in border studies.

Keywords: Political cartography; Border linearity; Map trap; Nation-state borderlines (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781800375383
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