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Whose Map Are We Living On Anyway?

BYKhaoula Ghanem

December 4, 2025

The world as we know it begins with a lie we’re taught so early, and so consistently, we barely notice it: The map. It hangs in classrooms, glows on phone screens, and forms the quiet blueprint through which we understand everything. Who sits at the “center,” who lives on the “edge,” whose land dominates, whose shrinks. We inherit a world arranged by someone else’s logic, someone else’s priorities. The question is never asked aloud, because the answer seems too obvious to challenge, but whose map are we actually living on?

Cartography has always been political. The German historian Arno Peters once said that “maps are weapons,” and the more you sit with the idea, the more disquieting it becomes. When European empires needed to justify power, they redrew the world, defined continents, renamed seas, invented regions, and flattened complex civilizations into labels that made sense only from London or Paris. Geography became a narrative tool, and European supremacy its silent author.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the most widely used map projection in the world: the Mercator projection. Created in 1569 by Gerardus Mercator for navigation, it stretches landmasses toward the poles and shrinks those near the equator. In practice, that means Europe looks enormous, noble, and central. North America expands like a swollen balloon, meanwhile, Africa—home to 54 countries, more than 1.3 billion people, and the second-largest continent on Earth—appears suspiciously small, almost compact enough to slip casually beneath Europe like an afterthought.

The Mercator map.

The real size of Africa is staggering. You can fit the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe inside it and still have room to spare. Its actual land area is over 30 million square kilometers—nearly three times that of Europe. And yet, for centuries, classrooms around the world have relied on a map that visually minimizes the continent whose resources built the modern West. This shrinking wasn’t just a mathematical necessity of flattening a round earth but a symbolic act, intentional in its utility even if not in its origin. The Mercator map became popular during the height of European imperial expansion because it inflated the landmasses of those very empires. Power looked big because it needed to.

The implications are not abstract. Numerous psychological studies in cognitive geography show that visual size on a map influences perceived importance, influence, and even “development level.” When a child sees Europe hovering large and centered, while Africa droops smaller and lower, they absorb a hierarchy without anyone speaking it. It becomes naturalized. The world’s north sits quite literally above the south; the West sits at the center of the frame; “developed” nations look larger, and therefore, on a subconscious level, more significant.

This is the same logic Edward Said dissected in his groundbreaking critical work Orientalism—the West’s power not just to dominate territory, but to define how territory is imagined. “The Orient was almost a European invention,” the Palestinian intellectual wrote, “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.” Cartography was one of the earliest tools used to codify those inventions. Once drawn, the map became a worldview.

And nowhere did that worldview leave deeper scars than in the Arab region. The borders of West Asia and North Africa—the very lines that dictate citizenship, identity, and often conflict—were drafted not by the people who lived there, but by British and French diplomats carving up Ottoman land on a table in 1916. The Sykes–Picot Agreement stands as one of the clearest examples of cartographic violence: artificial borders slicing through tribes, languages, and trade routes, creating states whose internal tensions still echo today. As historian Rashid Khalidi notes, these borders were drawn with “a ruler and a rifle,” serving as a reminder that imperial mapping wasn’t about accuracy but control.

If the distortion of Africa reveals one axis of that worldview, the names we use for regions reveal another. “Middle East” is one of the most casually accepted yet deeply Eurocentric labels in existence. Middle of what? East of whom? The phrase emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries as the British Empire sought to describe regions relative to London, and crucially, to the route toward India, its crown jewel. To British strategists, Arabia, the Levant, Persia, and Mesopotamia were “the middle” of the expanse between the “Near East” (the Balkans) and the “Far East” (China and Japan). These terms have hard geopolitical consequences by placing Europe as the fixed reference point around which the rest of the world rotates.

The “Middle East” was not a neutral geographic observation but a colonial category designed to simplify a region the British hoped to influence, occupy, and restructure. Decades later, it’s still used not because it reflects reality, but because Western media and governments continue to frame the region as a strategic zone rather than a coherent cultural space. As the Palestinian scholar Joseph Massad notes, such terminology “perpetuates the epistemological logic of empire,” reducing diverse societies into legible blocs for foreign policy rather than lived identity.

Meanwhile, the term “Levant” follows a similar logic. It comes from the French lever—to rise—the direction of the rising sun. From Europe, the sun rises in the East, thus the “Levant” describes the lands where the sun “comes up.” It’s a poetic phrase, but poetry can disguise violence. The name frames the region not through its own histories or cultures, but through a European’s directional experience. Historically, people indigenous to the region used their own frameworks—Bilād al-Shām, al-Maghreb, al-Mashriq, al-Jazīra—all of which describe geography through cultural logic, not colonial orientation. These names were gradually sidelined in global discourse, replaced by terminology that centers Europe’s gaze rather than the region’s own.

Some might argue that names evolve, that language shifts, that nobody means anything sinister when they say “Middle East.” But the persistence of these categories shows that the modern nation-state system, the borders we take for granted, the way we imagine continents, and even the sequencing of world regions all originate from European cartographic power. The map became a storyboard, and the West wrote itself as protagonist.

Even the act of orientation itself is shaped by ideology. Medieval Arab cartographers like Al-Idrisi, whose 12th-century map was one of the most advanced of its time, placed south at the top. Not because it was “more accurate,” but because worldview determines orientation. What we now see as “up” and “down” on a map could easily have been reversed had a different civilization’s cartography become globally dominant. There is nothing natural about Europe sitting on top.

And representation has material consequences. Development agencies often rely on maps to allocate resources and attention. When regions look smaller or peripheral, they are more easily deprioritized. A 2014 University of Oregon study found that map distortions can influence public support for foreign aid; participants were more likely to support assistance for countries they perceived as large and powerful. When Africa looks tiny, crises there often seem distant, isolated, and less urgent.

These distortions compound with global media narratives. For decades, Western coverage framed Africa as a continent in perpetual crisis, while maps visually confirmed its marginal status. The combination entrenched what Kenyan scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls the “cognitive colonization” of the global South—a worldview shaped not by lived realities but by inherited imagery.

The same is true for West Asia and North Africa. The phrase “Middle East” primes audiences to see the region as inherently volatile, eternally combustible, a permanent geopolitical chessboard. It makes military intervention easier to justify because the region already exists in the Western imagination as a space of instability. It also flattens the diversity of Arab societies—linguistic, ethnic, cultural—into a single, manageable category. And in its most extreme iteration, cartographic erasure becomes literal. For instance, in countless Western maps, Palestine fades into “disputed territory,” its villages unmarked, its presence bureaucratically thinned.

Meanwhile, the modern Gulf offers a counter-example: a region actively rebranding itself to resist inherited marginalization. Cities like Dubai, Doha, and Riyadh have invested billions into cultural production, architecture, and global media visibility, not just to attract tourism but to reposition themselves on the world’s mental map. It is a form of soft cartography, a reassertion of presence after centuries of being drawn by others.

Map of modern empires across the world between 1492 and 1945

To ask whose map we’re living on is to ask whose worldview we unconsciously reproduce. It’s to question why Europe appears centered when the earth is round and has no natural center. It’s to question why the global South is still called “south” even though the planet could just as easily be oriented upside down. (In fact, in many Indigenous Australian map traditions, it is.) It’s to question why the Arabic-speaking world is named only in relation to the West, never in relation to itself. It’s to question how colonization didn’t end; it just changed mediums.

The decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo argues that “modernity hides its darker side”—that progress narratives obscure the violence that made them possible. The modern map is one of those narratives, presented as a scientific tool rather than what it actually is: a colonial artifact infused with the agendas of the people who first drew it.

Relearning the world requires unlearning the map. It requires acknowledging that Africa is not peripheral but massive and central to human history, that “Middle East” is not a neutral descriptor but a colonial convenience, that Europe is not the natural reference point for world regions but simply the one that held the pen.

Whose Map Are We Living On Anyway?

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Whose Map Are We Living On Anyway?

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