The Last Map

Trade Route (Silk Road Foundation: http://www.silk-road.com)

In Geography And the Human Spirit, Anne Buttimer, a professor at University College, Dublin, recalls the work of an early-nineteenth-century German cartographer, Carl Ritter, whose work implied "a divine plan for humanity" based on regionalism and a constant, living flow of forms.  If Central Asia is any indication, the map of the future may represent a perverse outcome of Ritter's vision. 
Imagine cartography in three dimensions, as in a hologram.  In this hologram would be the overlapping sediments of various group identities such as those of language and economic class, atop the two-dimensional color distinctions among the city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in places by shadows overhead, indicating the power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security agencies that guard the wealthy in failing states and hunt down terrorists. 
Instead of borders, there would be moving "centers" of power, as in the Middle Ages.  These power centers would be both national and financial, reflecting the sovereignty of global corporations.

Many of these holistic layers would be in motion.  Replacing fixed and abrupt lines on a flat space would be a shifting pattern of ecoregions and buffer entities, like the Kurdish and Azeri buffer entities between Turkey and Iran, and Turkic Uighur buffer between Central Asia and China (itself distinct from coastal China), and the Turkic, Pathan, and Punjabi regions between Russia and the heartland of India.  (Extrapolating further afield, a Latino buffer entity may replace a precise U.S.-Mexico border.)

To this protean cartographic hologram one must add other factors, such as growing populations, refugee migrations, soil and water scarcities and - particularly in the case of Africa - vectors of disease.  Henceforward the map of the world will never be static. This future map - in a sense, the "Last Map" - will be an ever-mutating representation of cartographic chaos: in some areas benign, or even productive, and in some areas violent.  Because this map will always be changing, it may be updated, like weather reports, and transmitted daily over the Internet in those places that have reliable electricity or private generators.

On this map, the rules by which diplomats and other policymaking elites have ordered the world these past few hundred years will apply less and less.  Solutions, in the main, will have to come from within the affected cultures themselves.

The above is an excerpt taken from Robert D Kaplan, The Ends of The Earth: A Journey to The Frontiers of Anarchy (1996: Vintage Books), Chapter 22, "The Last Map", p. 336.

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