There is a quiet comedy in being a twenty-first–century student of geopolitics who can give a detailed explanation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement but would still hesitate if someone asked you to identify Lebanon on a blank map. This contradiction isn’t hypocrisy—it’s a product of the way most of us were introduced to geography in the first place. We memorized capitals, traced coastlines, colored in countries with Crayola fervor, and then promptly forgot everything not required on the quiz. Nobody bothered to mention that the shape of a country is rarely accidental—that the angles, curves, and borders were often carved out with reasoning that has nothing to do with culture, language, or lived reality.
Only later, usually much later, do we learn the uncomfortable truth: modern geography is not just geography. It is the fossil record of power. And once you see that, the map you once glossed over in middle school takes on a new, almost bruised clarity.
The first time most people confront this fact, it produces a strange double sensation: recognition and disorientation. Recognition, because suddenly the world makes more sense—why conflicts cluster where they do, why regions remain tense decades after independence, why national identity in many countries is less about shared origin than shared reaction to an imposed boundary. Disorientation, because it forces you to confront how much of the global landscape was determined not by the people who lived on it, but by men in European conference rooms drawing straight lines with the self-assurance of gods.
Those lines are still visible. The borders of many African and Middle Eastern states slice through communities, languages, and cultural regions without hesitation. They were drawn for the convenience of foreign empires, not the people who would later be expected to live with them. And yet, for those of us living outside those histories, they were taught as neutral facts—as though the outline of Iraq or Nigeria emerged naturally, like a coast formed by erosion rather than by diplomacy, conquest, and sometimes outright negligence.
So yes, it is absolutely possible to know the politics without knowing the map by heart. Map illiteracy doesn’t mean you don’t grasp the stakes; it means the stakes reach beyond cartographic comprehension. Still, there is something humbling—almost grounding—about sitting with a map and trying earnestly to understand the shapes not as lines but as decisions. A border that looks clean and geometric from afar can represent decades of resistance. A tiny peninsula, barely noticeable in a textbook, might have been the site of a rebellion that changed the course of a nation. Even the smallest sliver of land can be the reason two governments glare at each other across negotiating tables.
Learning that takes patience, but it also takes imagination. Maps flatten stories, and sometimes the work of reading them is the slow process of un-flattening—remembering that behind the perfect right angle are real cities, real families, and real consequences that spill into the present. Geography becomes less about memorizing where the mountains are and more about understanding who put the capital there and why.
But perhaps the most honest part of this modern condition is that our confusion mirrors the original sin of these borders: the people who drew them were also bad at geography. Many had only approximate knowledge of the places they were dividing. They carved territories using incomplete information, ethnographic guesswork, and the boldness of colonial confidence. If our internal atlases feel underdeveloped, it’s because we inherited maps from people whose understanding was equally limited but backed by military power.
This doesn’t excuse ignorance, but it does contextualize it. Being bad at geography doesn’t separate you from history—it binds you to it. You stand in the long shadow of decisions made on inaccurate maps with enormous consequences. The goal is not perfect recall of every border, but a willingness to look at the map with new eyes—to see it as something living rather than static, something contested rather than unquestioned.
There is something reassuring in that realization. It means you don’t need to flawlessly label every nation to engage meaningfully with global politics. What matters is curiosity, a willingness to return to the map instead of assuming it is settled, a recognition that the world is still renegotiating lines drawn long ago.
And maybe that’s the real story: not that we should feel embarrassed for not mastering every border, but that the borders themselves were never fully mastered—not by their creators, not by the governments who inherited them, not by the people now living inside them. They remain mutable, imperfect, and deeply human.
Understanding that is, in its own way, a kind of geography.
Kithéa 