Of Borders, Cartography, and Pluriverse(s) — Part I
The unfolding of many possible futures
The world is moving towards pluriversality, inevitably and irrevocably. It is reforming, reshaping, and rebuilding itself along very different lines, values, visions, and stories. We are in the midst of a Change of Era. Joanna Macy called this the Great Turning. The signs are all around us if we care to see. The tik-tok generation inheriting a broken world are no longer willing to live with and in brokenness. They are weaving very different narratives, fearlessly subjecting the status quo to unflinching scrutiny, repairing the fragmented and frayed fabric of societies. The violent chaos and collapse are portents of the end of an era and heralds of different futures.
The future(s) will be multi-layered, intertwined, and interrelated. Pluriversal. A pluriversal world is a gentler world, a kinder world of horizontal relationships rather than the vertical power asymmetry on offer today. This essay and the next few parts in this series will build on this theme.
“If it’s clear that maps have been central to the twin projects of colonial dispossession and capital accumulation, can they be mobilized in the other direction, not in the interest of accumulation, surveillance, and control, but collective liberation?” asks Jordan Engel, creator of the Counter-Mapping: The Decolonial Atlas Project
Nature’s borders are porous, fluid, permeable gateways of life. Exhalations and inhalations inform these borders which are imbued with the powers of resilience, restoration, and regeneration. Manmade borders, on the other hand, strive to be impenetrable barricades creating divisions, enclosing the ‘insider’, keeping out the ‘other’, locking people in fixed identities. They are most often politically designed boundaries dividing countries and nations, states and counties. They are redrawn, reframed, and reconstituted in alignment with the aspirations of the power-holders of the moment. Such manmade borders often remain contentious, violence-ridden, and vulnerable. They embody separation, otherisation, legalities of belonging and un-belonging. The term ‘citizenship’ becomes fraught with implications of who belongs and who doesn’t. Who gets to call the land within the borders ‘home’ is a poignant question blowin’ in the wind.
Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed: ‘Everyone has the right to a nationality’, and: ‘No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality’, it also omitted to say which state had the obligation to fulfil these rights. ~We're Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire **by **Ian Sanjay Patel
As voluntary and involuntary migrations of humans peak, the impetus to keep ‘the alien out’ and secure supposedly bounded and pure homelands of homogenous identities is growing, especially in the global north striving to retain their privileges and power. This move in a uber-connected world of high tech, continent-spanning supply chains, ‘import and export of labor for capitalism’s convenience,’ and paranoic surveillance systems is not only ironical but also futile. Migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants pour across manmade borders shredding to pieces the narrative of ‘growth and development’, of nations and nationalities, illuminating hegemony’s fault lines and underscoring the senseless vacuity of the economic monomyth.
The concept of ‘nation-states’ seem sacrosanct today, but in reality, it is a fairly recent construct. The “official” creation date for what is considered the modern nation-state is often pinned at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. However, it wasn’t until the end of WWII and the subsequent redefining of territory in Africa and the Middle East that the modern map began to appear. The fall of the USSR in 1991 redrew the map again, adding new states in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. These major shifts occurred within the lifetimes of people today, demonstrating that the current world order is anything but set in stone.”
Counter-Mapping: The Decolonial Atlas Project shows how mapmaking was an act of power and colonial prerogative. Cartography was very much a colonial project motivated by expansion, expropriation, and control.
Cartography has played a significant role in the acquisition of new territories by colonial governments—not only by putting colonial regimes of land ownership on paper, but also by providing an impetus and a cover for colonial expansion. … Cartography has been a significant tool in the expropriation of Indigenous lands at every stage of enclosure. In the US, the establishment of the Indian Reservation System required the mapping of borders between Reservations and private lands. The General Allotment Act of 1887 required the same territories to be remapped, divided up into privately-owned allotments. At every turn, colonial maps conjoin with juridical frameworks to legally enshrine the sanctity of private property—the basic unit of capitalist economic development. (highlights mine) ~Counter-Mapping: The Decolonial Atlas Project
I am trying to show two aspects here: 1) the concept and creation of nation-states are fairly recent phenomenon. 2) Mapmaking is not an unbiased, objective process of drawing lines and boundaries. Both are highly political, power-driven, and often imperial processes linked with colonial dispossession and capital accumulation.
For those wishing to deep-dive into decolonial atlases, here is a good summary by the founder of Decolonial Atlas, Jordan Engels: What Would It Look Like to Decolonize Cartography? A Volunteer Group Has Ideas. “While European settlers named states and cities after themselves, Indigenous communities often chose names with the land in mind, describing a specific feature, local species, or important cultural event,” says Engels.
With this context of borders and cartography, I invite you to stay with the images and events I have briefly described below. There are thousands of such incidents happening daily around the world. I am highlighting a couple to show the connections between colonialism, cartography, expropriation, dispossession, refugeeism, and capitalism. The orientation of a map, its projection, the presence of political borders, what features are included or excluded, and the language used to label a map are all subject to the map-maker’s agenda.
The vision and concept of pluriversality is, thus, an invitation to reimagine the fault-lines in the homogenous surface of hegemony as arcs of possibilities. Just as industrial monoculture depletes and destroys the ecosystem, so too extreme homogeneity renders societies and communities incapable of flourishing in times of intense upheaval and uncertainty. Diversity forms the bedrock of resilience and and regeneration, of sensemaking in chaotic times. The possibilities of arranging our lives are far greater than we imagine.
The borders, where the lands and waters of different countries collide, become strangely porous, permeable, and fluid zones. Manmade, politically driven, and hegemonic, they have been drawn, redrawn, and reformed for centuries by powers in control. Borders are therefore closely related to belonging and othering, to identity and recognition, to homelessness, refugeeism, and displacement. Arbitrary borders have overnight turned citizens into refugees, displaced hundreds of thousands rendering them stateless. Borders are contentious zones of violence and also of visions.
In spite of the might of the military and the powers of surveillance, borders become places of entanglement, interpenetrating and interweaving, blurring differences and desires. Borders are human endeavor to keep things neat and tidy, controllable and unambiguous, but often become liminal zones of entanglements. The first question people ask strangers is ‘where are you from?’ But when this ‘where-ness’ is dissolved through displacement, refugeeism, and homelessness, borders cease to matter. They become obstacles to life. Such was the case of the Blue Boat that sank off the coast of Greece.
“At least 78 people have died and hundreds more are feared missing in the deadliest refugee shipwreck off Greece this year.” Thu 15 Jun 2023, The Guardian The victims, nearly all of them men from Afghanistan and Pakistan, drowned when the large trawler they were travelling in capsized off the southern Peloponnese. They were trying to enter what they deemed to be a ‘safe haven’ illegally.
This tragic, completely avoidable incident reflects the deadly impact of necro-capitalism with its ensuing climate crisis and entangled polycrisis forcing the most vulnerable and the least responsible to succumb. As climate refugees and war refugees risk their lives to cross the oceans in search of a safe haven, the Western world is desperate to seal their borders. There is complete disregard of and indifference to the fact that this upheaval is an inevitable outcome of the colonial project, carried over as neoliberal capitalism and a predatory, extractive cult of growth-driven economy. The hegemony rampantly displaces people, expropriates their land, steals their resources, and expects to face no repercussions. ‘We are here because you were there’ is literally what all dispossessed can tell the Eurocentric, hegemonic powers.
These are just a couple of examples of displacement and refugeeism. If one is willing to stay with the unsettling and unrelenting questions, it is easy to see the reasons behind these convulsions in global demography. The most vulnerable are not going out invading countries or waging wars nor are they burning up fossil fuels. However, they are the refugees—the displaced, the disinherited, the dispossessed. They didn’t ask for it. They don’t deserve it.
Borders have the power to render lives illegal conferring labels like migrants, refugees, immigrants.
No term better than ‘immigrant’ helped convert those post-war migrants into the insinuating ghosts of a colonial world supposedly separate from domestic British life. ~We're Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire by Ian Sanjay Patel
It is now self-evident to the most obtuse that imposing a hegemonic world order designed to benefit a handful necessitates endless violence—wars, political destabilizations and coups, ecocide, epistemicide, genocide, ethnic-cleansing, displacement and creating of refugees, and everything in between. Because no nation or people really like being advised and controlled, hegemony has to be imposed via insidious means—changing laws and regulations, investing corporations with more power than nation-states, closed door policy making by oligarchs, and many other contrivances. Basically, rather nasty, brutish measures covered up under the garbs of progress, development, growth, and similar meaningless blather.
The Eurocentric hegemony deliberately creates the following conditions:
Constant exploitation, extraction, expropriation of the earth and all sentient beings
Intentional socialization of costs and impact on the most vulnerable
Deliberate destabilizing of countries and nations not willing to subjugate themselves
Incessant warfare and aggression to capture more of earth’s ‘resources’
Ceaseless propaganda to wrap everything in gloss and glitter
Finally, assign to themselves the mantle of superiority and righteousness that reeks of control
These deliberately-created conditions to maintain the hegemonic order are directly linked to displacement, refugeeism, migrations, homelessness, and immigration.
To quote Warsan Shire, “No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”
Today, the fabric of our civilization is unravelling as the very Earth rejects the imposition of an imperial-colonial-necrocapitalist world order. This rejection is visible in many ways—an entangled, exacerbating, and cascading interplay of causes and events called Polycrisis. Add to that a deep sense of dissonance that everyone is experiencing in their daily lives, and the polycrisis becomes metacrisis, a crisis of sensemaking and meaning making.
As the hegemonic metropole seeks to tighten its borders while still extracting and exploiting the periphery beyond its borders, this periphery now spills over into the metropole. However, this is not a recent phenomenon of globalization and neoliberal capitalism. They have always been a part of the imperial-colonial project’s fallout.
Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe. ~Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island
This imperial project of colonization not only ravaged cultures and civilizations but also reshaped the demographic profiles of continents. As populations were shunted from continent to continent as salves in the infamous Atlantic Slave Trade to the indentured labor of Malaya’s rubber plantations and soldiers from colonized countries fighting the Empire’s wars, the demographic map of the planet convulsed, shifted, and reformed itself. Thus, people, labor, resources, and wealth flowed from the periphery to the metropole with scant regard for human dignity, freedom, and rights. It began with Europe, and then the colonial mantle shifted smoothly to the USA after the first World War. The underlying narrative remained unaltered.
This centuries old project conferred vast privileges to the Empire while decimating the rest of the planet, destroying communities, devastating families, and completely wiping out local cultures. This dynamic is still playing out in resource-rich regions of the world like Congo, Sudan, and Gaza. The deliberately instigated and ongoing turmoil in the Middle East is hegemony’s last-bid attempt to control and access the region’s rich gas and oil reserves. This knowledge necessitated the creation of many myths to justify the empire’s existence—from pretending to be harbingers of civilization to being bearers of ‘democracy’.
Quoting from a couple of research papers below:
Drain from the South is worth over $10 trillion per year, in Northern prices. The South's losses outstrip their aid receipts by a factor of 30. Unequal exchange is a major driver of underdevelopment and global inequality. ~Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015
An associated article: Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960
Economists Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel described this as a “hidden transfer of value” from the South, which sustains high levels of income and consumption in the North. The drain takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt violence of colonial occupation and therefore without provoking protest and moral outrage.
But this also had wholly unintended consequences. The pockets of diverse diasporas thus created in the midst of the ‘White Empire’ became the hidden rifts and fault lines in hegemony’s monolithic and homogenous narrative. Much as the hegemony would like to keep the metropole ‘white’, the empire would cease to exist without the diaspora.
Even as powers that be try to build barriers and erect borders, pockets of pluriversality sweep them away. Never has it been so difficult for the power centers to convince the masses of their credibility. Their collapse is imminent, ignominious, and inevitable. They know it; we know it. It is painfully visible in the ever-tightening grip of surveillance, authoritarian policies, military excesses, unfettered censoring, increasingly outlandish propaganda, and the mindless rapacious wars. Gaza is hegemony’s defeat. Sudan, Congo, and many many other nations are proof of its greed, lust, and chicanery.
As nation-states make futile attempts to seal borders and dissuade refugees, the desperate and the dispossessed seep through the cracks, unraveling the hegemony and shrinking the metropole. As the hegemony implodes from within, we can sense the ‘universe’ fracturing, its cosmology predicated on supremacy, separation, and imperialist privileges splintering into kaleidoscopic fragments. The Gen Z within the metropole are no longer willing to play the game of hegemony and are out in the streets, rising up on TikTok, and upending the rules of the game. They can see the planet they are inheriting, and they are ready to rewrite the script.
Change of Era — from hegemony to pluriversality
As global warming peaks, parts of the earth are going to become uninhabitable.
Temperature records have already been obliterated in 2023 and intensifying heatwaves, floods and droughts have taken lives and hit livelihoods across the globe, in response to a temperature rise of 1.4C to date. Scientists say far worse is to come if temperatures continue to rise. The secretary general of the UN, António Guterres, has said repeatedly the world is heading for a “hellish” future. ~World facing ‘hellish’ 3C of climate heating, UN warns before Cop28
Refugees will flood the habitable places. Many of the most vulnerable may not make it. And unless there is a shift in perception, ‘border apartheid’ will exacerbate the looming crisis. The other option is to see it as an opportunity to create a world not predicated solely on colonial cartography but also on our interconnectedness, to celebrate our differences and diversities. To build a world predicated on relationality, non-duality, and non-hierarchy.
Yes, it sounds improbable, idealistic, and maybe plain foolish to those wedded to concepts of linear progress and cultural hierarchy. Seen through the current lens of separation and supremacy, the very notion of a pluriversal world is unsettling, absurd, and unnatural. However, whether we like it or not, the exacerbating polycrisis is already making itself felt in various ways—floods, droughts, arctic temperature rise, ocean acidification, land degradation, risk of multiple breadbasket failures, and many many more interlinked events are going to create vicious resource wars. There will again be a convulsion and churn of global demography. This needs to be seen through very different worldviews than the one responsible for where we are today.
All of us born in these times are witness to a civilizational transition whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we want to be or not. We are called upon to bear witness, to be amanuenses and chroniclers, to be catalysts of emergent possible futures. This requires a profound love for our planetary existence and for all sentient beings even in the midst of the horrors, violence, devastations, and depredations. It is easy to lose faith; who doesn’t these days. But to bear witness and have faith is an act of revolution, a profound act of decolonization. It’s a belief in our own particular, unique calling.
Walking away is a failure. Of imagination, and of faith. We don’t know even know what the story we’re in is called, or the shape of it, and we certainly don’t know how it will end. So all we can do is live fully in the part of the story that we are in. … Who says, like Samuel Beckett in The Unnamable, ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ And then who smiles. ~Sharon Blackie, On faith, and not losing it
The hegemonic power holders need our hopelessness, despair, and rage. By refusing their bait, we can continue to stay in the cracks, and keep preparing and nourishing the soil for very different futures to take root. In this vein, I invite you to see borders as fluid zones of pluriversal possibilities, zones of transgressions as well as transformations, where entangled, entwined lives and inter-permeability of narratives fracture the ironclad, unyielding surface of hegemony.
As the planetary demography heave and roil, become ineradicably entwined and entangled, the homogenous narrative of endless hegemonic growth is irreversibly cracking and ‘alien’ ideas and visions extrude into the carefully constructed homogenous center. There is no longer a recognizable and reducible single story. The fabric of hegemony is fraying, rents appear in many guises from marching bodies on the streets to activists shutting down arms factories.
As this artificially and colonially constructed world gives way with its hollow bulwarks and scaffoldings revealing their sordid secrets, the earth is rising in multitudes of ways to signal the end of this epoch.
The pluriverse is premised on the notion of our indelible interconnectedness, our entanglement, and our communities. It doesn’t deny individual sovereignty or agency, but recognizes the power of communities and citizenship. Let’s stay with this for a moment.
I believe the antidote to hegemony lies in reclaiming our agency and our communities. And they are not contradictions. We become resilient and robust communities when our agency is honored. Hegemony fears the power of committed people coming together as communities, and hence leave no stone unturned in vilifying efforts at solidarity and allyship. Hegemony is a cult of people committed to capital accumulation, power, privilege, and supremacy. Any deviation from this cult calls down retribution in various forms—from incarceration to ostracization. There is no community within the hegemonic narrative; there cannot be.
Hence, reclaiming and remembering our pluriversality is the work of community and participatory citizenship. The current pockets of resistance and movements rising across the planet are antidotes to this hegemonic behemoth. We need to see these movements not as disparate protest marches but as nodes of a large web of interconnected narratives predicated on certain common foundations—equity, justice, wellbeing, dignity, solidarity, and peace.
And as Wade Davis, the Canadian anthropologist says,
These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit—other options, other visions of life itself.