This seminar at the British Library explores the historical and contemporary links between war making and map making.

With Phil Cohen, Hillary Shaw, Mateusz Fafinski and Doug Specht.

Tickets: https://www.bl.uk/events/cartography-on-the-front-line

This is the opening panel of Front Lines: In and Against the Fog of War, a programme of live events, webinars and workshops organised by Livingmaps Network.

Map-making and war-making and their associated technologies have been closely linked throughout the 20th century. Today they continue to be mobilised in tandem in both offensive and defensive spaces of military action. The destruction of urban infrastructures and displacement of their civilian populations have become key military objectives, deploying drones and other technologies of civil surveillance. ‘Home fronts’ have increasingly become war zones, whilst even the most local conflicts take place within a global mediascape. At the same time a different cartography has emerged to both document the impact of war on everyday life and to help build networks of resistance and resilience amongst those communities who find themselves on the front lines.

Programme

Phil Cohen – The Map, the Territory and the Fog of War

In this introduction to the series Phil will offer a critical overview of how cartography has become transformed from a specialised instrument of local military planning into a global medium of ‘shock and awe’ strategies aimed at civilian populations. Far from dispelling the ‘fog of war’, the discrepancy between map (the ideological rendition of events) and territory (the everyday experience of those living and dying in the war zone) has grown ever greater, as currently exemplified in the coverage of the war in Ukraine.

Phil Cohen is Emeritus Professor at the University of East London and the research director of Livingmaps Network responsible for curating this programme. He is the co-editor (with Mike Duggan) of New Directions in Radical Cartography (Rowman and Littlefield 2022). His latest book Things Aint What They Used to be: notes from once and future times is forthcoming from eyeglass books.

Mateusz Fafinski – There Be Stories: Narratives of Maps and Contested Spaces

Maps help us understand the world, but they can also obscure, confuse, and hide. There are no neutral maps: each of them conceals a web of stories and narratives. This makes maps very powerful objects. From ancient maps through medieval mappae mundi and modern newspaper charts, cartography has been used as means to contest power and space. Looking at them as important ordnances in a struggle for authority, ideology, and history we can learn more not only about out past but also our present. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, Mateusz will explore how maps find themselves at the frontlines of civil and military conflicts.

Mateusz Fafinski is a historian and digital humanist. He is currently a fellow at the University of Tübingen, affiliate researcher of CESTA Stanford, and an Assistant Lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, he was a TextTechnologies Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. He works on the history of late antique and medieval world, historical sources in the digital sphere, narratives of maps and charts, as well as the history of cities.

Hillary Shaw – ‘Build no more fortresses; print images’: Maps and War Propaganda

War is about armies and territory, but it is also waged through propaganda derived from cultural and emotional cartographies. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary examples, Hillary argues that maps are both imagistic and territorial; they may include flags, stamps, and logos and often convey covert messages about class, race and gender as well as national identity. Against Clausewitz’ famous dictum he argues that maps can be a form of ideological warfare which the vanquished may not even realise has been successfully waged against them, even though the official war map is open to view.

Hillary Shaw is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. His research encompasses human and cultural geography, social economics, health inequalities, politics and public policy, His latest monograph, Sleepwalking to Serfdom (2023), investigates critical societal challenges in the context of increasing inequality, geo-political unrest and the implications of unrestrained technological innovation for humanity.

Doug Specht – Mapping the Unmappable : How Cartographers Represented the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Maps have long been used to plan, implement, and explain war. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, media organisations began producing hundreds of maps in an attempt to tell the story of what was happening on the eastern borders of Europe: maps of occupation, of territory gained or desired, of refugee migrations, and the changing names of places. Media supportive of the Russian invasion have their own maps too. All of these maps are an abstraction, important to help us comprehend the changing global landscape, but none of them are a complete truth of what is happening, and often they mask the nuances of the situation. Doug’s talk will examine the way maps tell stories in war, exploring colour, symbology, data, and tragedy through cartography.

Doug Specht is a Chartered Geographer, a Senior Lecturer (SFHEA) and the Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. His research examines how knowledge is constructed and codified through digital and cartographic artefacts, focusing on development issues in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

This event will not be live-streamed, and takes place at the British Library.

Front Lines is a programme of live events, webinars and workshops organised by Livingmaps Network addressing the historical and contemporary links between war making and map making.