It took Frantz Fanon just a few pages into his book The Wretched of the Earth ([1961] 2005) to expose the colonial order as one built and fuelled by violent compartmentalisation and exclusion, calling into question Europe’s pretensions as the universal standard of culture and civilisation. Fanon’s intervention hoped to awaken the consciousness of the colonised, causing them to rise up and reclaim both their lands and human dignity – a project that could radically transform the notion of humanity into one no longer premised on domination and the negation of the Other. Fanon’s decision to craft the moral core of decolonisation theory as a commitment to valorise ‘the wretched’ stands as his enduring legacy. Similarly, Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed ([1970] 2005) analysed the oppressor–oppressed binary to propose a path that, through ‘conscientisation’ or consciousness raising, could lead the oppressed to emancipation. Both Fanon the psychiatrist and Freire the educator captured the core of the modern world’s alienation process; they argued that the mechanism of domination remains feasible as long as the oppressed continue identifying themselves with their oppressor, therefore making emancipation also a possibility when the oppressed come to identify otherwise (Goussot, 2012).

That the world in which we live has been produced and can thus be produced differently was a prominent focus of 20th-century continental philosophers and theoreticians who lived through colonialism’s ‘boomerang effect’ on Europe as exercised by fascist Germany (Césaire, [1955] 2001). These thinkers included the Frankfurt School as well as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, whose writings geographers have come to adopt in recent decades to expose the work that conceptions of space do to produce and reproduce the modern world. Within statecraft, for example, Foucault’s writings have helped show how maps do work similar to that done by institutions such as mental hospitals and prisons: the map contributes to controlling territory as the state controls its inhabitants through those institutions, tools that transform inhabitants into subjects for the state’s reproduction (Foucault, 1977). As another example, Derrida’s suggestion that the literal is ‘intensely metaphorical’ has similarly been adapted to suggest the science of the map itself also serves as metaphor (cited in Harley, 1989).

Drawing from such insights, geographers today argue that rather than simply revealing knowledge about the world, maps help create the world, leading scholars within the discipline to abandon any notion of space as a container or stage within which the world proceeds, and instead to now favour notions of space as undergoing continual construction (Massey, 2005; Thrift, 2003). Scholars engaging with critical cartography in particular have become cautious of the work that modern maps do in situating the viewer above and outside space, for such a view has been key in fostering a false sense of separateness between the viewer and what is viewed, promoting the notion of space as an object and engendering a geographical imagination where nature and its local inhabitants have become merely resources for settlement, domination and exploitation (Gregory, 1994).

To thus rewrite the relationship between periphery and centre from an anti-colonial perspective entails the deconstruction of the colonialist and imperialist ideology that has long dominated the system of Western knowledge and that remains today, in the age of globalisation, assuming more pervasive and occult forms (Ardito, 2007). Therefore, attempts at emancipation must aim to debunk any idea that the given situation is natural and what must be shown instead is that what is presented to us as necessary is, in fact, absolutely not inevitable (Fisher, 2009).

This chapter assesses the effectiveness of critical cartography in raising a broader anti-colonial consciousness since the field began, not only critiquing maps, but calling for movements to ‘counter-map’. We begin by providing a brief overview of the cultural context that gave rise to Western cartography in order to denaturalise it, and we then expand on how critical theory helped develop theoretical frameworks for scholarship on critical cartography following the decolonial movements of the 20th century. We then illustrate how, in spite of the growth of critical cartography and the call to counter-map in the face of settlement, domination and exploitation, neocolonialism continues to advance the use of maps for its purposes in new, inventive forms. We conclude by suggesting that the dramatic rise in the gathering, storing, processing and delivering of geographic information today continues to influence neocolonial cartographic practices and suggest throughout that attention to competing worldviews is central if a critical cartography is to be effective in dismantling colonial impositions of time and space.

The rise of Western cartography in cultural context

European colonialism has famously imposed a notion of a universal human civilisation that negates or absorbs difference, aiming towards a universal sameness among those it considers civilised. Nikolai Trubeckoj (1982) traces this spirit to Roman-Germanic culture, a cultural context where a notion of cartography was born proclaiming itself as a universal conception of space. A characteristic trait of Roman civilisation, for example, was the pursuit of well-being in daily life, which it considered to be a central aspect of humanity. This was a pursuit maintained through the military administration of territory, as illustrated by its Tabula Peutingeriana, a third-century ancient Roman map that carefully listed and described the empire’s military access roads.

The 13th-century Germanic Ebstorf world map (Figure 1.1) integrated biblical and classical elements and illustrated the world as a circular construction. Lands outside Europe and beyond North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean were understood as terra incognita, and like other medieval maps at the time, it followed the T-O construction with Jerusalem at its centre. The O depicted the outer ring of the ocean and the T the dividing lines of three continents as related to the biblical story of Noah’s three sons: Shem who mapped on to Asia, the birthplace of Christianity; Japheth who mapped on to Europe, the realm of Christianity’s expansion and domination; and Ham, the so-called ‘cursed’ son, who mapped on to Africa, Europe’s most devalorised location.

These medieval worldviews were clearly related to the views of Augustine’s City of God, which suggested that the will of God placed Christians at the centre of the known world and relegated non-Christian peoples to the outer spaces, even along the boundary of non-human beings, or ‘monsters’, whose brilliant and decorative effects were often relegated to the margins of maps (Figure 1.2).

Meanwhile, for the civilisations of Abya Yala (the Americas), which Christendom had yet no place for, understandings of the world developed quite differently. In Abya Yala, space and time were often intimately linked, rendering the map and almanac calendar one and the same (Milbrath, 1999). Time was cyclical; its study was mainly intended to predict future events, and scaled on enormous durations based on repetitive cycles. For example, Maya calendars and almanacs like the Dresden Codex (Figure 1.3) were shaped by astronomical observations and refined mathematical calculations. Maya maps might thus be seen as a cross between history, cosmology and descriptions of territory: when they marked their borders, they added information on how they had conquered those areas.

Medieval Western maps were often illustrations designed to clarify concepts of space and time based on the pre-Ptolemaic model. Their value lay not so much in their practical use but in how they depicted concepts that corresponded to sacred texts. These were illustrations of history, philosophy or encyclopedic references, not points that referenced the earth’s surface. Columbus himself followed a medieval spirituality in many ways; he had intended to meet the Great Khan of China, about whom Marco Polo spoke at the time, in order to convert the Khan to Christianity. He also understood that the great purpose of all his voyages was to eventually undertake a new crusade to liberate the ‘Holy Land’ (Watts, 1985).

At the same time, Columbus was influenced by Toscanelli’s calculations of the distance between Europe and Asia from the west, suggesting it might be relatively shorter if travelled at higher latitudes. Toscanelli had spoken with the king of Portugal and written to Columbus, and he was a friend of Nicholas of Cusa, the mathematician and astronomer who referred to experience, nature and the human condition rather than to tradition and the authority of the sacred texts. Thus, for Columbus, the earth was a terrestrial globe – that is to say, the totality of ocean and land, rather than a medieval flat disc.

Columbus believed in the significance and aptness of his names: Cristobal (bearer of Christ, from the Greek) and Colon (coloniser). He himself changed the names of the places ‘discovered’: Guanahani became San Salvador (God), and then in order of importance: Santa Maria de la Concepción, Ferdinandina, Isabela and Juana (the Virgin Mary, the sovereigns of Spain and the Infanta, respectively). He later renamed a vast number of places, as Tzvetan Todorov (1999) notes, which fell in line with Europe’s problem with the Other.

In the mid 16th century, following Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of Abya Yala, geographers and cosmographers in Europe would come to shape cultural worldviews that used science to legitimise conquest. Those in the Netherlands would become an important group in this history. Their practices came to focus on depicting the earth’s surface by adopting the Cartesian reference system, Euclidean geometry and Galilean physics. Among the group was Gerardus Mercator, a mathematician and cosmographer who had studied at the Catholic University of Leuven where the Christian humanist and Renaissance scholar Erasmus had been a student. Mercator became known for his treatise on triangulation and would later become known as the father of a cartography that came to treat the globe as a scientific instrument and the world as a physical surface to be scientifically measured (Figure 1.4). Also among the group was Willem Blaeu, a pupil of the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who drew high-quality maps of various states, created important atlases and, notably, became cartographer to the Dutch East India Company.

In the following century, Newton would come to assume that space was absolute in nature – a type of container of objects and facts – whose dimensions he also based on Euclidean geometry. He founded his mechanics on the idea that space was distinct from bodies and that time would pass uniformly. Newton’s universe was an infinite space in which bodies move in a straight line unless deviated by another body exerting a force. Meanwhile, his contemporary Leibniz would anticipate Einstein, arguing against the Newtonian absolute conceptions of time and space in favour of relational ones.

Kant came to legitimise Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics along the way, arguing that space and time were inner conditions of the human, allowing for perceptions that would subsequently be ordered by logical categories, thus rejecting religious assumptions that had previously been sacred. Kant, a professor of physical geography, argued that space and time were not objective realities but subjective constraints allowing for the sensory-cognitive capacity of the human mind to represent objects (e.g. a priori forms of sensory intuition). Appearances were phenomena; things in themselves were noumena; space and time were a priori forms of intuition, both transcendental and universal. Kant’s conception of the universal was quite specific: the capacity to exercise the human mind in this way belonged to those beings his society determined to be endowed with reason, thus excluding those deemed incapable of assimilating into this imposed-upon ideal.

In the same century, the Cassini family would map France using geodetic triangulation for the first time, then a technical innovation. Mapping by using a measurement apparatus with precision fell in line with the spirit of the Enlightenment, the esprit de géometrie, without adding ornaments or frills, setting a standard for cartography thereafter (Figure 1.5).

Mercator’s projection of the world, which, in privileging distance over area, emphasised the size of the global North and de-emphasised the size of the global South, was to become hegemonic. Lambert’s cylindrical equal-area projection (1772) became the first to privilege area over distance and was followed by others, including James Gall’s projection (1855), which critiqued Mercator’s map for privileging the needs of navigators while sacrificing form, polar distance and proportionate area. Arno Peters would later build on Gall with the Gall–Peters projection (1973), presenting a highly unconventional representation of the earth’s surface and aiming to eliminate the ‘normal’ Eurocentric image of the world found in common atlases.

These alternative views of the world were controversial and even referred to as ‘ugly’, for Mercator’s representation had become so familiar to Westerners that his map was often taken simply to represent what was true and natural, even though what was ‘natural’ turned out to be merely ‘conventional’, the result of tradition and ethnocentrism.

Just as the conditions of possibility for a (Eurocentric) Mercator projection are important to consider, so too are those related to the Gall–Peters projection. The Gall–Peters projection was born in the era of decolonisation, a time of hope for a more equitable and, above all, more peaceful world. The Bandung Conference of 1955 had marked the beginning of the efforts of non-North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and non-Soviet countries during the Cold War to seek their own paths of development. Shortly thereafter in 1961, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was born in Belgrade, one of whose fundamental principles was pacifism in relations between states, with India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser and Yugoslavia’s Tito as its major advocates. Later in 1989, Arno Peters would publish the only atlas at the time to represent all areas on about the same scale, a historical context that also saw the release of the Brandt Report’s map of the unequal relationship between the global North and global South (Figure 1.6).

New map families such as anamorphic maps would also come to relative prominence (Gastner and Newman, 2004; Tobler, 2004), in which cartographical techniques were able to conserve the relative proximity of areas even as the parameter under study involved an increase or decrease in spatial area. For example, cartograms allowed viewers to quickly grasp great differences for a wide range of practices in different societies and countries, irrespective of area and distance. In one specific case, for example, which maps daily income over 200 USD, the Netherlands appears much larger than its relative spatial area than India or Mexico (Figure 1.7).

Geography’s shift?

Decolonial movements and the counter-maps they inspired were key in the rise of critical cartography within geography by the 1990s,¹ which continues to the present day. As a subfield, critical cartography has helped theoretically situate maps as discourses of ‘power/knowledge’ (Foucault, 1980), thus displacing them as neutral scientific documents. Key works within the literature suggest that the traditional manner in which we understand the map and the way it fashions knowing and seeing have often been negative and disenabling (Harley, 1989; Wood, 1992).

The scholarship often draws upon Donna Haraway’s (1988) notion of situated knowledges to throw into question the possibility of an all-knowing subject. Haraway’s work exposes the problematic notion of an ostensibly disembodied scientist in his or her (but often his) claims to objectivity and universal knowledge, a phenomenon that her work referred to as a god-trick, or ‘view from nowhere’ that ignores our human limitations, convinces us objectivity is possible and obscures from us questions concerning who has the authority to look and from where. Rather than suggesting that claiming knowledge of anything is no longer possible, Haraway asks that we acknowledge that all knowledge claims are embodied and that we recognise that each of our positions as observers reflects our positions in society. With these, the best we can hope for is a situated knowledge where one can claim only partial knowledge of what there is to know. Thus, for the question of map-making, the cartographer’s partial knowledge is relevant and interesting, but only as part of a bigger picture.

Insights such as these also allow for an understanding that the oppressor and oppressed will inevitably have distinct views of the world, leading us to better understand how scientific Truth (capitalised here to mark its imposition as universal) is intricately linked to power and the social, economic and cultural locus of the observer. In exposing this interplay, Edward Said (1978) showed how Europe produced and continues to produce ‘the Orient’ – its colonial gaze always seeking to ‘know’ the world in order to have power over it. It is a reason that sees, dominates and instrumentalises humans and space, developing the social sciences not simply to know or even to create the world, but to dominate it. This gaze perpetuates colonial institutions and practices even after formal colonialism has been dismantled, continuing to frame how the West knows, represents and ultimately produces the colonised themselves.

Much like Haraway would later argue, for Said no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim scientists’ involvement as human subjects in their own circumstances. And it is for this reason why, for Fanon ([1961] 2005), it would be the wretched of the earth who could play the revolutionary role – their position in society as wretched would have the least to lose and most to gain in the creation of the world anew.

From such impactful interventions, within the discipline of geography there thus exists a ‘cartographic anxiety’ (Gregory, 1994) about the map’s complicity in imperial/colonial power and the chronic persistence of this relation in present assumptions about cartography. This is the case even when choosing map projections, as the Mercator/Gall–Peters controversy attests. These histories of the map’s use and of its production itself highlight the complexity of cartography as a language of communication with functions that far exceed their role as mere bearers of spatial information that are commonly attributed to them. Maps are thus never replicas of reality; they interpret and can even create a reality laced with the assumptions and logic that guide the construction process itself. Indeed, the terrestrial ellipsoid cannot be developed on the plane, because the two surfaces have different total curvatures: the choice of the type of deformations (angular, areal, linear) always suggests, but not always consciously, a point of view. Ultimately, this choice reflects the prevailing cultural climate: the Mercator map of the world was itself produced following the invention of perspective by Renaissance painters.

Critiques of modern maps as weapons of the coloniser eventually led some scholars to suggest that ‘more indigenous territory has been claimed by maps than by guns … [thus] more indigenous territory can be reclaimed and defended by maps than by guns’ (Nietschmann, 1994), which led some indigenous movements to ‘counter-map’. It was in the early 1990s when Edward Said and Nancy Peluso, writing about different contexts, introduced the term to describe grassroots map-making by indigenous peoples in Palestine (Said, 1993) and Indonesia (Peluso, 1995). It became immediately evident that counter-maps could be effective in disrupting truth claims and are interesting in themselves for their ability to engender notions that non-state actors could make competing and equally powerful maps (Wood, 1992). Nevertheless, counter-mappers did not always recognise that, without a strategy guiding the map’s use, even indigenous counter-mapping could come to impose a new hegemonic reality that followed colonial logics, reproducing the colonial world itself (Wainwright, 2008).

The question for the counter-mapper that has often been overlooked, is if non-Western conceptions of space and time are being replaced when seeking cartographic recognition from the Western gaze. The points, lines and polygons that exist on maps are practically all human artefacts, falling into two categories: engineering works (roads, bridges, dykes, runways, railway lines, surveying landmarks) and administrative and property boundaries. As Couclelis (1992, p. 67) writes: ‘Throughout the history of Western culture, these two categories of Euclidean features have been essential to the regulation, domination and control of the geographic world: the natural world, in the case of engineering works; the social world, in the case of boundaries’.

So while the map is not the territory, the map runs the risk of asserting that it is the only possible representation of the territory (Dematteis, 1985). We must recognise that maps – whether colonial or anti-colonial – are related to the cultures to which they belong and to whom they make sense, and in the first instance, to those cultures’ metaphysical conceptions of space and time. There is no escape from the cartographic paradox: to provide a functional image, maps must lie (Monmonier, 1996) by favouring some elements over others, necessarily making invisible other possible stories, other possible ways of being, even extinguishing them. As Yves Lacoste states in the title of his (1976) book, La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre, geography exists, first of all, to make war.

Maps and the persistence of colonised worlds: some examples

Cartography as a whole retains, for the most part, an overwhelmingly Eurocentric understanding of the world (Blaut, 1999; Castree, 2003; Sheppard et al., 2013). In mapping regions and continents, the main point of view represented continues to be that of colonial powers; they continue to hold control over countries they once formally ruled over directly, with present-day political boundaries testifying to this continued order. In settler-colonial contexts, conventional mapping conforms to propensities for excising racially minoritised and colonised peoples within these boundaries. In both cases, whether colonial or settler-colonial, the shared logic that predominates is the desire to control, objectify, manipulate and exploit colonised people’s environments. Also present is a generalised culture–nature or human–non-human dichotomisation that paves the way for separating people from their environments and relating to land in terms of its exploitable potential.

The mapping of Africa is a salient example. Africa is typically split into two parts, one north and one south of the Sahara. This is a colonial perspective that refuses to see continuities, papering over cultural unities among African peoples. It is as if centuries of knowledge sharing and trade across the Sahara never existed, simply because European colonial authorities either did not acknowledge them as historically important, or when they did acknowledge them, it was to prevent them from posing a threat to colonial rule. The current French military interventions in Mali, Libya and Chad serve as examples: the Tuareg must be forcibly assimilated into a Sahel-centred state (Mali), whose borders were carved out by French colonialism and traversing sections of the Sahara; crossings and flows from Libya to Chad must be suppressed to ensure the French-supported Déby dictatorship remains intact, along with resource control for French capital.

Maps that insist on drawing boundaries across deserts and savannahs reinforce the persistence of a colonial world order that remains imposed on many African peoples. It reduces space to what colonial powers deem to be acceptable, representing ecosystems as if they could be neatly divided by administrative fiat. A different map could show instead existing continuities (both social and ecological) and political contestation by displaying national state boundaries as interrupted lines and showing areas where alternative and/or rival political arrangements exist, such as the Tuareg struggle to establish Azawad or the Saharawi struggle for independence from the US- and French-supported Moroccan monarchy. To map out these existing alternatives and contestations would be a cartographical act that does not take colonial and derived national state impositions for granted and that speaks to the tenuous nature of boundaries, which are contingent on the relative successes of military interventions by colonial powers and the related dictatorial capacities of local regimes.

The construct of a sub-Saharan Africa is overwhelmingly common in cartography and has repercussions for understanding ecosystems and how African life-ways have co-evolved with them. To show the falsity of this construct and also the artificiality of separating African peoples, it is possible to create maps eliding the divide by showing contiguities of cultural traits (such as the distribution of languages and religions) and of physical environments (the regional boundary, after all, rarely coincides with ecosystem differences). As a contrast to received mapping imaginaries, such an alternative map can provoke an exploration of the ideological underpinnings, involving colonial strategies of control by way of division, as Edward Said (1978) pointed out some time ago, and long-standing Eurocentric imperialistic obsessions with the spread or presence of Islam and/or Arabs.

The settler-colonial nature of North America can be exposed in similar ways. The relationship of ideological constructs with cartographical representation is evident in United States Geological Survey (USGS) topographical maps. In this case, omissions, obscuration and ethnocentric categories help reproduce colonial and racist worldviews. Because they are regarded as neutral and objective (authoritative) spatial representations of reality and because they continue to be used widely, even in urban and regional planning, USGS maps constitute an important process in the reinforcement of colonial processes.

There is much more than mere change over distance being represented in such cartographical products of the US state. There are factories, mines, boat landings, residential areas, channelised streams, dams, reservoirs and cemeteries (usually those of white people), among other features. Ecological processes are usually confined to marshes, surface waters, peaks, depressions and vegetation reaching heights above two metres, among other representations that focus on the layout of the terrain, rather than the distribution of organisms or interactions among them. The mapped features are divided between cultural and ‘natural’ features, with the latter portrayed in much fewer and more general categories and as subservient to the former. For example, marshland or forest is more generic than the differentiation shown among a society’s land uses (representing a population within a single species, to put it ecologically). There are no beaver dams or distinctions between types of grasslands or forests. The emphasis is squarely on the ‘cultural’, even though the cartographers claim the map to display mainly topography. More than this, the cultural is really reflective of just one kind of society, the settler-colonial capitalist society. Nature is separated from society and reduced to what is useful to a particular social formation.

Every now and then, there are attempts, for example, to signal the importance of the historical presence of African diaspora communities, but typically this is by way of cemeteries or slave plantations, as if African people never taught whites anything, never imparted cropping system knowledge, never contributed to the actual shaping of a landscape through such activities as farming, agricultural innovations and much else (Carney, 2001). Native Americans also exist, but only by way of reservations. The USGS maps erase from view their historical reshaping of the landscape, such as large monumental architecture (incorrectly called ‘earth mounds’) and the persisting grassland-forest ecotones, the extent of their original territories, their current struggles to regain land stolen from them, and the location of their ancient settlements. Such ideological terms and silences buttress a view of the world that justifies the annihilation of other peoples and, with it, other ways and possibilities of relating to land, environment and place. Such a process of settler-colonial indoctrination can be exposed by alternative representations showing the extent of conquered territories (including those illegally grabbed according to US federal laws), much beyond current reservation regimes and the presence of cultural markers in the landscape left by all peoples, not just Europeans.

In fact, what is seldom recognised is that USGS maps are landscape representations in part for military purposes and in part for partitioning conquered land for commerce and state use. Terrain maps have historically served military ends, and USGS maps do not depart from this tradition. Aside from longitude–latitude, Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinates, which are used primarily by the military, feature among the three coordinate systems. They are sometimes given prominence by the display of grid lines devoted to that coordinate system only. Critical industrial infrastructure is highlighted, such as power plants and lines, pipelines, port facilities and major factories, implying defensive as well as offensive military priorities. Green areas are used to symbolise vegetation but only if it is higher than two metres. As the USGS maps explain, the purpose is to identify troop movement or troop-concealing forest canopies. Actual US military installations are largely made absent or devoid of the same level of detail as other landscape features. Such omission is unsurprising, but what is taken for granted is a world of highly armed and belligerent institutions that have little care for the security of the vast majority of people.

More than this, USGS maps project a settler-colonial mindset through the use of the State Plane Coordinate System (SPCS) in addition to the focus (described above) on industrial infrastructure, the underpinnings of commerce. The SPCS was introduced in the 1930s to improve records of original land surveys by standardising measurements to a single datum (North American Datum of 1927), using Cartesian coordinates to divide each state into zones and using English imperial units (Stem, 1990). This facilitates and raises the accuracy of local and regional land surveying, while obscuring ecological and social differences and historical markers. Every surface is rendered into an empty, abstract polygon. Such divisions of land are crucial to delineating property boundaries. After all, if land is to be fungible – that is, exchangeable in the market – it must be eviscerated of meaning and ecological dynamism. In other words, in the case of the United States, conquered land (the loot) is thereby divided up according to capitalist logic of distribution to those with capital. It should be clear that such a topographical map is virtually useless to ecologists, botanists, organic farmers (who may, for instance, want to know much more about local ecosystems), pastoralists, gatherers or hunters, to name a few other possible alternative imaginaries and actual uses. More importantly, such mapping directly pre-empts any notion of Native American self-determination and sovereignty. It is thus that USGS maps are specifically settler-colonial representations of the earth’s surface.

Conclusion

The rules of Western cartography serve not simply to represent space but to impose one way of relating to, seeing and imagining the world – a worldview it claims to be superior. This is the case even though the creation of Western cartography itself was dependent on non-Western knowledges. As is well known, while the first colonisers renamed the lands they wished to conquer before even setting foot on them, in order to map those lands they needed the support of the indigenous peoples living there (Turnbull, 1998). Today, geomatic instruments such as drones equipped with topographic tools map from above in order to assist in further wars of dispossession and here again their use is never neutral. The technologies may evolve but the assumptions that inform Western cartography remain, contaminating if not colonising the very ways of being and doing that were previously non-Western.

As the move from paper to digital formats opens new perspectives, the dilemmas related to representation and map use have persisted, without solving or only partly solving previous conflicts. As smart devices become more map driven, users are folded into banal aspects of ‘Where am I?’ and ‘Where would I like to go?’ While it is possible to associate a global positioning system (GPS) image with a photo, to search for addresses and to follow directions from one place to the other, what users often find themselves doing is instead ‘surfing’ a reality that becomes more and more virtual. In this way, contemporary mapping emphasises the individual over national or collectivist projects. And in the meantime, the power the individual holds is itself deluded as social media companies capitalise on their map-driven aspects by extracting location data and by tracking users. Here we see a very different use for maps: a technology that previously sought to conquer territory now seeks to conquer everyday life.

A fundamental notion of critical cartography – that maps are expressions of power and desire – led scholars to take seriously the idea that maps can be used to show utopian worlds, create alternative social planes and aid groups in battles against domination. Nevertheless, late capitalism continues to succeed in subsuming and neutralising alternative points of view and protest – its response to ecological catastrophe via a ‘green capitalism’ is a prescient example (Leonardi, 2017). For counter-cartography, map-driven smart devices that allow one to act alone risk isolating users, further removing them from the community and rendering them dependent on a pervasive technology that seeks to take control of everyday life.

As the global liberal order continues replicating the colonial logic of asserting itself as the best of all possible worlds, it is important to keep in mind that critical cartography is concerned with the social relevance, politics and ethics of mapping (Firth, 2015). The order being imposed today follows a market-liberal utopia that claims the world will be perfect once market logic and human rights are applied, yet that results in ecological catastrophe, new forms of apartheid as are apparent in Palestine and in slums worldwide, and incentives to privatise intellectual creativity along with water, minerals, wood and human DNA. Thus, if we are to do a critical cartography under an ethics and politics of anti-colonial liberation, then we must keep in mind that the work of critique is to analyse what appears obvious, natural and inevitable in order to create the world anew. Critiquing cartography towards this end means not simply examining how maps helped colonise the world, but how maps continue to create the world in step with the colonial logics and worldviews that began being imposed globally over five hundred years ago.

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