I’ve always loved looking at the world from above. I can spend hours on Google Maps, clicking and dragging my way through cities and towns in far-flung places, dropping my digital avatar on dusty back roads that are maintained just enough for the Google truck. Close up, the street grids and winding rivers and clustered houses tell stories of how people live. And on a global scale, maps show a settled reality, one where each country nestles into its neighbors, the messiness of determining where one place ends and the other begins dealt with by people long ago.
I was born near the end of the 20th century, a time that some heralded as the end of history. And understandably so! I’m sure Fukuyama has caught a history’s worth of flack for that rosy picture with the 20/20 hindsight provided in the mess 21st century, but at the time, walls were falling, long-simmering conflicts appeared to be resolving, and Western-style liberal democracy was having its heyday. It must have seemed as though the world was self-sorting, resolving into the peaceful global village that the internet promised to create. (I recall all of this well, of course–I was three years old.) But history, despite our best efforts, erupts around us.
As a Canadian kid, I recall first understanding that the world was not as tidy as it seemed when I looked up at a dusty map hung on the wall of my second-grade classroom. According to this map, the Northwest Territories sprawled across northern Canada, reaching up towards the North Pole in a constellation of islands. But this was wrong–I had recently been forced to learn all of the Canadian provincial and territorial capital cities, and the hardest one to pronounce, Iqaluit, was the capital city of a territory that wasn’t on this map.
I’m sure I raised this with my teacher, who probably explained calmly that Nunavut, the territory of which Iqaluit was the capital, wasn’t a recognized territory until the 1990s. Could she have been so bold as to say it hadn’t existed at the time the map was printed? It’s possible, although the Inuit people who had called Nunavut home for millennia would have begged to differ. I don’t recall whether I was appeased by whatever was her answer–all I can remember now is the confusion caused by this tiny rift in my own world order.
Although a fairly innocuous example, this reckoning was an important first step for me in understanding the complexity of my maps, and, really, the world. In fact, the history of the geography we’re taught in elementary school is much darker than I could attempt to explain here, but the briefest survey of world history shows how much of the world (particularly in the Global South) was sliced and diced by greedy, racist colonialists who only cared about maximizing profit.
Ever since I’ve turned a critical eye on my maps, I’ve started to notice something else: even now, there are places around the world where solid gray lines turn to dashes. In these spots, our aspirational world–populated only by sovereign, independent nation-states–starts to fall apart, and the algorithmic arbiters of Google Maps have thrown up their hands and decided not to take a clear stance. When I look closely, I can see how these dotted lines blink across the desert between Somalia and Ethiopia; hack their way through the dense rainforest between Venezuela and Guyana; bookend the northern and southern parts of Sudan. And then there are the places where the solid lines are not yet broken, if only as an ideological bulwark against takeover.
The lines don’t seem to mean much on days like today, as Russian tanks roll over the solid line of the Ukrainian border. Unable to do anything, we watched in horror as a country and its people were threatened and bullied, and we watch now as they are invaded. History marches forward.
There is so much I don’t understand. I have no expertise in this situation (hopefully that goes without saying). All I have is my own shock and discomfort. On days like today my massive media consumption disguises the mismatch between my observation of world events and my capacity to affect them. While we can all, in our respective countries, elect responsible, thoughtful leaders, there’s not much I can do as an individual to stop Putin from expanding his empire.
It’s always been easiest for me to imagine that all geopolitical kinks were ironed out in a series of brutal global conflicts before I was born. This is my own naivete, I know, as I’ve never had to wonder whether I can return to the land I call home. But, even if I’m foolish for saying this, I don’t have much of a framework for understanding how one nation can just claim another. It’s a taste of life in 1939, I guess, or 1439, for that matter. I know that fights over land and sovereignty are a feature of human societies, and there are a million historical conflicts I know nothing about, but that doesn’t make it any less horrifying to witness in real time. It doesn’t help to see people on my Twitter feed callously announcing the end of the world (which they also did last week, and the week before that, and on and on).
So I’ve been reminding myself of what I learned long ago: despite what my maps would lead me to believe, the course of history is not confined by solid lines. It unfolds around us. Eventually we understand that peace is tenuous, whether we’re tracing the dotted lines or watching videos of smoke drifting up from Ukrainian airports and military bases.
I was listening to NPR on my drive home today, and Hanna Hopko, a former Ukrainian Member of Parliament said this: “It’s not time to be scared. Putin has to be scared, because he’s a little gangster with a heart full of fear. He’s afraid of transatlantic unity. He’s afraid of our optimistic spirit, that we will win, and he will never bring us back under Russia’s sphere of influence.” I teared up listening to her. Unlike me, she actually has skin in this game, and she is ready to fight.
Acknowledging how quickly tyrants can act is not a capitulation to their might–it’s a call to fight back. I’m tempted to believe that the world is already settled, or, in the opposite extreme, throw up my hands in defeat, believing that every new conflict is the end of the world. (Moderation has never been my strong suit.) But both are wrong, as they give in to the lie that history has already been written and thereby surrender our ability to shape it. So I guess I’ll just sit here, tapping away in my discomfort, remembering that borders, like the rights of the people within them, are never truly settled. And as long as there is a world to map, there will be people to fight for.