The Maps That Started Wars (And the Lines That Still Haunt Us)
There is a particular kind of power in drawing a line. It costs nothing — a pen, some ink, a steady hand — and yet a line drawn on a map can determine where a family belongs, which language their grandchildren speak, whether a people are a nation or a minority, whether two countries are neighbours or enemies.
Some of the most consequential moments in modern history weren't battles or speeches or elections. They were men in rooms, often men who had never visited the places they were dividing, drawing lines on maps. The consequences of those lines are still being lived — and died — today.
The Durand Line: A Border Through a People
In 1893, a British diplomat named Mortimer Durand sat down with Abdur Rahman Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan, and negotiated a border between British India and Afghanistan. The resulting line — 2,640 kilometres of it, cutting through some of the most rugged terrain on Earth — was intended to define British and Afghan spheres of influence and keep the Russian Empire at a comfortable distance.
It did not especially matter, to the men drawing it, that the line ran directly through the Pashtun homeland. The Pashtun people had lived on both sides of what would become the border for centuries. The Durand Line divided their territory with the indifference of a ruler laid across a table.
Afghanistan has never formally accepted the line as a permanent international border. Pakistan, which inherited it from the British in 1947, insists it is. The tension between those two positions has fuelled a conflict that has never fully resolved — a border drawn in an afternoon in 1893 that is still generating consequences well into the 21st century.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement: The Map That Remade the Middle East
In May 1916, while the First World War was grinding through its second year, a British diplomat named Mark Sykes and a French diplomat named François Georges-Picot sat down with a map of the Middle East and drew lines across it.
The Ottoman Empire was collapsing. Britain and France, anticipating victory, were deciding in advance who would get what. The result was a secret agreement — only made public when Russia's Bolshevik government leaked it in 1917 — that divided the Arab world into British and French spheres of influence with a ruler and a pen.
The lines paid little attention to the ethnic, religious, and tribal realities of the region. The agreement drew borders that cut through Kurdish territories, separated Shia and Sunni communities, created states that combined populations with centuries of conflict, and ignored promises that had been made to Arab leaders who had fought alongside the British in exchange for independence.
The borders that emerged from Sykes-Picot — refined, adjusted, and imposed through the post-war mandate system — became the map of the modern Middle East. Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine all have their contemporary shapes, in some form, because of lines drawn by two diplomats who had never visited much of the territory they were dividing.
The agreement is still invoked today — by historians trying to explain the region's conflicts, and by political movements that cite it as a foundational injustice that was never properly resolved.
The Berlin Conference: Africa Divided in an Afternoon
In November 1884, representatives of fourteen European nations gathered in Berlin at the invitation of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Over the following three months, they worked out how to divide Africa among themselves.
No African nation was invited. No African leader was consulted. The continent — with its hundreds of distinct peoples, languages, kingdoms, and cultures — was parcelled out according to European commercial interests, strategic calculations, and the personal ambitions of men like King Leopold II of Belgium, who walked away from the conference with personal ownership of a territory seventy-six times the size of his own country.
The borders drawn at and after the Berlin Conference cut across tribal territories, separated related peoples, and forced traditional enemies into the same colonial administrative units. They were drawn by people with no knowledge of or interest in the human geography of the continent they were carving up.
When Africa's nations gained independence in the 20th century, they largely inherited those colonial borders — partly out of practicality, partly to avoid the chaos of renegotiating every line simultaneously. The map of modern Africa is, to a significant extent, the map that European diplomats drew in Berlin in the winter of 1884.
The consequences — ethnic conflicts, contested territories, states that struggle to cohere because they were never designed to — continue to shape the continent today.
What These Lines Have in Common
The Durand Line, the Sykes-Picot borders, the African partition — they share a common quality. They were all drawn by people with power over territories where they had no roots, no knowledge of the ground truth, and no stake in the consequences.
A map is an abstraction. From far enough away, any territory can look like a blank space to be divided. The people who actually live there — who know every valley and village, who have centuries of relationship with the land and with each other — are invisible at that scale.
This is the dark side of the power of maps. The same capacity to represent the world, to make it comprehensible and navigable, can be turned towards erasure — making complex human realities disappear into clean lines and coloured zones.
And Yet
It would be easy to end here, on a note of pure pessimism about what maps can do in the wrong hands.
But maps are also the opposite of this. They are, at their best, acts of attention — careful, loving attempts to see the world as it actually is, to record what is there, to make the invisible visible. The history of cartography is full of people who made maps not to divide territory but to understand it: to trace coastlines, to name mountains, to document the routes between one human settlement and another.
The same impulse that draws a line across a people's homeland can, in different hands and with different intentions, produce something that captures the beauty and complexity of a place — a record that says this is here, this exists, this matters.
That's the kind of map we prefer to make.
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