A French Atlas of the Gulf States
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/20067/a-french-atlas-of-the-gulf-states
Using a more demanding approach, the team of Le Monde Diplomatique and its famous cartographer, Phillippe Rekacewicz, have introduced a series of critical atlases, dealing with globalization, global conflicts, and environmental issues. In so doing, they are subverting the usual canons of mapping, often viewed by its critics as a tool in the hands of (military) powers, rather than an instrument of revolt and awareness. The former is probably the reason that, since the cultural and post-colonial turn of the 1990s, English-speaking academics seem to be wary of such intellectual products, seeing them as instruments of domination that utilize oversimplified—if not altogether flawed—categories intended to impose facts on the ground that in reality do not exist. Indeed, most governmental statistical data contribute to the legitimation of borders that often continue to be irrelevant.