United Nations, explained.
The "Equal Earth" map projection on a screen in Shanghai, China (Wang Gang via Getty Images)
A vote to make the world map fairer has become a proxy fight over sovereignty and whose history counts.
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A fairer world map – but old borders creep back inA fairer world map – but old borders creep back in
Maps were originally designed as part of a technical exercise in making geographical space legible and usable. Plotting coastlines and calculating routes enabled sailors to navigate across oceans and discover new landmasses. Over time, however, they ceased to be just technical and acquired a political meaning. The recent debate over which map best represents contemporary geopolitical realities is the latest reminder of this.
The United Nations General Assembly this month voted (Opens in new window) overwhelmingly to endorse a more equitable way of representing the world. The resolution, introduced by Togo and backed by the African Union, received 164 votes in favour, one against and six abstentions. It encourages governments, schools, international organisations, and technology companies to use equal-area projections such as Equal Earth (Opens in new window), which emphasise accurate relative size of landmasses.
The “Correct the map (Opens in new window)” resolution encourages gradually replacing the Mercator projection (Opens in new window), which was developed in the 16th century primarily for navigation, and which dramatically enlarges landmasses as they move away from the equator. The most cited example perhaps of the distortion is that Greenland can appear comparable to Africa (Opens in new window), despite being just 7.1% of its size.
These instances reveal that what began as an attempt to correct the unequal visual representation of continents became entangled with sensitive territorial disputes in contemporary international politics.
It is true that no two-dimensional map can represent a spherical Earth without distortion (Opens in new window). Equal Earth corrects one problem – relative area – but sacrifices other properties such as the shape of countries, directions, and distances. So more than establishing which map is technically superior, the UN resolution reveals three different political claims being made.
For the African states that drove the initiative, the problem with the Mercator map is that it influences how people imagine the relative importance of different parts of the world. Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey (Opens in new window) captured this logic when he argued that maps shape our understanding of the world, influencing education, imagination and collective perceptions. The resolution, therefore, was framed in terms of equitable representation and cognitive justice.
Among the major powers, France appears to have accepted much of this reasoning. On the same day as the UN vote, France announced (Opens in new window) that it would abandon Mercator for diplomatic uses in favour of the Eckert IV projection, which, similar to the Equal Earth, is better suited to representing actual continental areas.
The countries abstaining from the vote represent the second claim of sovereignty associated with maps. Ukraine, for instance, did not reject the principle of equitable representation, but objected (Opens in new window) to the way the Equal Earth map represented Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation, particularly Crimea. Moldova (Opens in new window) subsequently explained that its abstention was in solidarity with Ukraine’s concerns. The four other abstentions – Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, and Serbia – have not yet offered any explanation for their stance.
Sovereignty concerns were not confined to those that abstained. India and Japan, both of which voted in favour of the resolution, subsequently raised concerns about how the new map depicts their own contested territories. India stressed (Opens in new window) that its support was for the underlying principle of equal-area cartographic representation, not for any particular depiction of national boundaries. It insisted that Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, and Arunachal Pradesh must be represented in accordance with India’s official map.
Japan similarly supported (Opens in new window) the resolution but objected to the depiction of the disputed Kuril Islands, which appear in the same colour as Russian territory. These instances reveal that what began as an attempt to correct the unequal visual representation of continents became entangled with sensitive territorial disputes in contemporary international politics.
The UN emblem itself uses a circular world map based on what is called an azimuthal equidistant projection centred on the North Pole, rather than an equal-area projection (Bernd Dittrich/Unsplash)
The third political claim comes from the United States that was the only country to vote against the resolution. Washington argued (Opens in new window) that the initiative could not be separated from what it called a broader “radical ideological project”, objecting particularly to references to reparations and cognitive justice. It questioned why the United Nations was devoting attention to a 16th-century map and argued that such resolutions contribute to the organisation’s loss of credibility.
What would this mean in practice if the resolution were widely followed? The resolution itself is non-binding, and therefore governments and institutions are not required to formally discard the Mercator projection. In any case, doing so may be impractical for navigation platforms that make better use of the Mercator projection.
Classrooms, however, offer a more immediate opportunity. Rather than simply replacing one map with another, geography education could introduce students to different projections and the trade-offs each entails, helping them understand that no single map provides a neutral or complete representation of the world.
Amid all this, there is also an irony that the UN will eventually have to deal with. Its emblem (Opens in new window) uses a circular world map based on what is called an azimuthal (Opens in new window) equidistant projection centred on the North Pole, rather than an equal-area projection. The resolution does not necessitate a change to the UN emblem, but it leaves us with an interesting thought: if maps shape how we see and understand the world, should the UN lead by example and rethink its own?
About the author
Abhinandan Kumar
Abhinandan Kumar is a PhD Candidate at the Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University.
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