Maps and Minds

We tend to see maps as innocent things. We think that neutral diagrams that tell us where we are. They’re on our walls, in our pockets, and in our schools. We use them to locate ourselves, to find direction, and to feel a sense of place. But maps, like stories or myths, don’t just describe reality. They decide what counts as real.

Maps shape the world as much as they show it. They are not just tools but are instruments of power. Behind every neat border and labelled region lies a set of choices. They are about who gets to belong, who is left out, and what is considered valuable.

The history of map-making is not a silent one. It has been deeply tied to conquest, colonization, and control. When European empires expanded, they didn’t just invade land—they redrew it. They drew lines on paper that claimed ownership, divided communities, and renamed places that already had names. In doing so, they introduced a way of thinking we might call territorial essentialism—the idea that people naturally belong to the areas marked out for them.

This belief didn’t come from the land itself. It came from the ambitions of those who wanted to manage it.

In many parts of Southeast Asia before colonialism, territory was not a box with clear edges. It was more like a ripple. Power flowed outward from a center—like a sacred city or royal court—but the edges were soft. It is often known as Mandala system. People belonged through relationships, through language, trade, loyalty, and shared stories. The Khmer empire and Malay sultanates didn’t use borders the way colonial states later did. Their maps, if they had any, were maps of connection, not confinement.

Colonialism changed all that. Western cartographers arrived with rulers and grids. They flattened rich local knowledge into square boxes. They ignored how people used land spiritually, seasonally, or communally. Instead, land became property. It became something to tax, to sell, to extract. Indigenous geographies, oral traditions, pilgrimage paths and sacred forests were dismissed as childish or backward.

This wasn’t just a matter of drawing lines. It was a matter of deciding who could draw them. The mapmaker became a kind of silent ruler. The map maker was able to erase a people’s past, define their future, and determine who counted as a nation.

Over time, these foreign lines became internal beliefs. We began to treat them as if they had always been there, as if they were carved into the earth, not scribbled by colonial administrators in distant offices. We started to believe that the state, as drawn on a map, was the highest form of truth. That idea still shapes how governments rule and how people suffer.

After colonialism, things did not return to how they were. The newly independent states not only kept the old maps but also added new myths. They borrowed symbols from the pre-colonial past and attached them to colonial borders. Some countries claimed the shape of its nation as something ancient and sacred, even though it was only recently defined. Some countries celebrated its “unity in diversity” while suppressing dissent from groups like the indigenous peopls who had their own stories and their own maps. Take a look at Myanmar, India, Thailand or Indonesia for Southeast Asian examples.

Nationalism today often takes this form: a dangerous mix of rigid boundaries and selective memory. It uses both colonial tools and ancient empires to justify power. It claims that belonging is fixed—that each people has a rightful place, and everyone else is a stranger. This turns borders into barriers and identities into weapons.

What makes maps powerful is also what makes them dangerous: their simplicity. A line seems clean. A border feels final. But these drawings hide far more than they reveal. They leave out centuries of movement, intermarriage, negotiation, and exchange. They make it seem as if conflict only arises when someone crosses a line, when in fact the line itself may be the cause of the conflict.

Simplifying complexity is not neutral—it is political. When we flatten the world into boxes, we also flatten people. We erase the grey zones of belonging where most real life happens.

The most stubborn myth of all is that borders never change. That what is drawn on the map is timeless. But history constantly redraws the world. From Africa’s colonial frontiers to the breakup of the Soviet Union, borders are often the result of hasty deals and forgotten conversations. Yet we still treat them as sacred. In the South China Sea, China’s “Nine-Dash Line” is a perfect example. It is not a reflection of deep history, but a modern invention disguised as ancient truth. Maps like this aren’t used to understand the past. They are used to control the future. They are tools of power, used by elites to rally support, distract citizens, or assert control.

We do not need to throw away maps. We need to read them differently—with skepticism, empathy, and imagination.
Let us ask better questions: Who drew this map? For whom? Who is missing? What other ways of living together might we imagine?

Some ethnic groups, like the Rohingya or West Papuans, or even internal nations like Navajo, Karen or Shan, may choose to embrace strong identities in order to resist being erased. That is strategic essentialism, which means using the language of identity not because it is true forever and always, but because it is useful now. But even as we assert these "strategic" identities, we must remember that they are human creations, not eternal facts. Otherwise, there is a risk of us becoming who we fight.

The lasting solution lies in imagining new ways of belonging. Ways that allow for shared spaces, layered identities, and flexible governance. Borders can be meeting points, not prisons. Communities can be built on trust, not lines.

Nowhere is this struggle clearer than in Myanmar. The military-dominated state insists on a single characteristic—“Burmaness”—for a country filled with dozens of nations, hundreds languages, and countless histories. The Dobama Movement claimed that from the Himalayas to the sea, everyone must be Burman. It was later used to develop myths and justify control but not to build unity.

But the peoples fought back. The struggles are not just against the army, but against the idea that their identities could be reduced to conform lines on a map. Ethnic groups like the Kachin or Karen did not simply ask for independence. They demanded the right to be seen, to be complex, to belong without being absorbed. Myanmar’s neighbors have not aggressively attacked and assertively claimed the lands or peoples at its borders. It is not outsiders, but insiders, who continue to colonize in the name of national unity.

Maps are not the enemy. But treating them as sacred truth is. When maps are mistaken for moral law, they serve kleptocrats who hoard power, nepotists who inherit it, and plutocrats who buy it. The lines we inherit should not determine who we are. We must see maps for what they are: human tools, shaped by history, and always open to revision.

Only then can we begin to imagine a politics where belonging is not determined by geography alone but by dignity, memory, and mutual respect.