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Mutating Maps: Territory, Population Density, and Economies of Sovereignty in Post-Revolutionary Syria
Abstract
When the Syrian Revolution showed first signs of engulfing the whole region into a transnational war fought among multiple states and all the more brigades in mid-2012, maps that represented the traffic in territory among these actors, proliferated. Often accompanying UN, NGO and media reporting on Syrian state’s attacks on areas and populations under self-declared “rebel control,” the real-time mapping of this traffic through names of an ever-increasing number of brigades countering those attacks, doubled as evidence, rather than remaining a claim, for the Balkanization of Syria, and later Iraq. With the advent of the so-called Islamic State as a territorial polity spanning Syria and Iraq, these real-time “situation” maps intent on capturing that entity broke with political mapping conventions (of representing nation-state territories in single and uniform color blocks). Instead, a population density overlay as a proxy to mark the amoebic territoriality of the Islamic State onto that of Syria and Iraq (2014 and 2015) itself quickly became a convention. through an anthropological analysis of maps that I have collected between 2012 and 2022, this presentation examines how these mutated maps that constructed visual cues for territory through population density in Syria, opened up for a multi-party renegotiation the country’s territorial integrity. While a variety of actors ranging from the UN to Syrian Observatory for Human rights, Al-Jazeera to Noria Research laid claims to this new modality of territorial representation, they sped up the economies of sovereignty that continue to define the traffic in territory in post-revolutionary Syria.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geography
History
Political Science
Sociology
Geographic Area
Kurdistan
Syria
Turkey
Sub Area
None