Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age

Throughout history, maps have been a powerful tool in the constitutive imaginary of governments seeking to define or contest the limits of their political reach. Today, new digital technologies have become central to mapping as a way of formulating alternative political visions. Mapping can also help marginalised communities to construct speculative designs using participatory practices. Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age explores how the development of new digital technologies and mapping practices are transforming global politics, power, and cooperation.

The book brings together authors from across political and social theory, geography, media studies and anthropology to explore mapping and politics across three sections. Contestations introduces the reader to contemporary developments within mapping and explores the politics of mapping as a form of knowledge and contestation. Governance analyses mapping as a set of institutional practices, providing key methodological frames for understanding global governance in the realms of urban politics, refugee control, health crises and humanitarian interventions and new techniques of biometric regulation and autonomic computation. Imaginaries provides examples of future-oriented analytical frameworks, highlighting the transformation of mapping in an age of digital technologies of control and regulation. In a world conceived as without borders and fixed relations, new forms of mapping stress the need to rethink assumptions of power and knowledge.

This book provides a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the role ofmapping in contemporary global governance, and will be of interest to students and researchers working within politics, geography, sociology, media, and digital culture and technology.

Pol Bargues-Pedreny is Research Fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, Spain

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, UK

Elena Simon is PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, UK, and research assistant at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg, Germany