Modern Ethnic Enclaves and Territorial Disputes

 

I made my first map for this blog as a geography major. I feel pretty cool. The idea for this was sparked by an extra credit assignment for my class, and by a couple memes found on r/serbia (the Serbian subreddit). It seems that many Serbs are very interested in how this conflict between two middleweight powers over a breakaway province parallels with their own struggle with Kosovo and the wider world. One must also realize the danger of other powers such as Turkey and Russia intervening with both, as they already have two shadow wars in Libya and Syria. A third is a bad idea. 

I share one of the memes in this poster. Having seen moose lay like this before, I thought it was pretty funny. I also include translation.

This combination of a thematic map and a reference map shows how two border disputes nearly 3,000 miles apart can have remarkable similarities. The relationships between the two countries, both bordering borderlands with violent pasts and futures are difficult to see for a domain expert. For someone with a broad knowledge of ethnic conflict and cooperation, and the similarities in topography, climate, enclaves, political systems, and propensity for conflict, the Balkans and the Caucasus are a suitable match for comparison. The data is qualitative,, and while the borders are quantitative pieces of data in a geospatial database, they are mutable because no matter how good your software, the boundaries we create are ultimately idealizations of the imagined community we participate in as humans. 

A second point to be made about the mapmaker’s perspective. National Geographic’s goal is to represent the world from a scholarly, good looking map, that can be digested by the everyday viewer. It also is a little US-centric from the perspective of most mapmakers and Russia, China, and Serbia. (I am biased to Kosovo, FYI) Kosovo is despite its lack of recognition by 95 out of the 193 countries that comprise the UN, drawn as a real country without dotted borders indicating its disputed status. (Most mapmakers don’t do this) This also shows National Geographic’s pragmatism. After many years of being called the Czech Republic, National Geographic was one of the first to acknowledge “Czechia” as the new and much easier to state name of the same old republic.

Nagorno-Karabakh, as a disputed, almost autonomous region receives the dotted lines, even though now it is in the same position Kosovo was in the 1990’s. It will be interesting to see who the US backs in this region in this war, if at all.

For a bigger copy of the poster above, take a look below the references.

References

Getty Images. (2020). Artillery Gun being fired in Nagorno-Karabakh. In The Economist. https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/10/03/war-returns-to-nagorno-karabakh

reddit. (2020). Jermenija i Srbija mim s losovima i zapaljenim autom (Armenia and Serbia meme with moose and a burning car). In reddit. http://www.reddit.com

War returns to Nagorno-Karabakh. (2020, October 3). The Economist; The Economist Media. https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/10/03/war-returns-to-nagorno-karabakh

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Data Sources: National Geographic, Esri, Garmin, HERE, UNEP-WCMC, USGS, NASA, ESA, METI, NRCAN, GEBCO, NOAA, increment P Corp.