ATLAS OF BORDERS

This land is (not) your land.

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” Mark Twain’s sardonic observation comes to mind when reading this captivating and wide-ranging collection of maps that highlight conflicts and disputes around the world. “Most often, borders are drawn in blood,” write the authors. “Even if we don’t take decolonization into account, more than a hundred states have established their borders through war.” Papin and Laborde are cartographers at the French daily Le Monde, and Tertrais is deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, a French think tank on international security issues. Beyond their many visually arresting maps, the authors also include insightful aperçus—the book is French, after all—that don’t usually make it into an atlas. The authors quote, for instance, the late legal scholar François Terré: “All borders are artificial, in the sense that they are defined by men and are therefore arbitrary: they are scars left by history.” Among those scars are numerous hot zones. Individual pages are devoted to Kashmir, the Mideast, and the South China Sea. A few maps explore the evolution of Ukraine, Russia’s invasion of that country, and Russia’s sphere of influence; as with all the images in the book, these maps are sharply designed in muted colors and accompanied by useful text. There’s much that will be new to readers: The Germany-Denmark border was established by a public referendum in 1920; a third of the world’s recent pirate attacks have occurred in the Gulf of Guinea; and tiny Märket, in the Baltic Sea, is the smallest island in the world divided by two countries (Sweden and Finland). Other maps document more familiar subjects. Addressing a global “proliferation of walls, barriers and fences”—notably, the world’s most traveled border, that between the U.S. and Mexico—the authors glean wisdom from philosopher Thierry Paquot: “A wall expresses a lack of understanding, separation, segregation….The builder of walls is a polluter of humanity.”

Exquisitely rendered maps of troubled territories, buttressed by a philosophical framework.