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Call for paper for the workshop: Global Histories of Cold War Cartography
Edinburgh,
ScotlandCartographic technologies and sciences underwent revolutionary transformations during the global Cold War (1945-1989) as military officers, scientists, governments, private corporations, universities, and think tanks sought to define and adapt to global political and historical contexts. New technologies, including radar navigation, satellite imagery, the World Geodetic System, and GPS, met the demands of new kinds of global warfare, including counter-insurgency, but also were redeployed to serve civilian and developmental ends of the Cold War.
In regions like Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the Cold War was anything but ‘cold’, cartographic technologies played a crucial role in defining battlefields as military and paramilitary forces sought to control and conquer territory and to eradicate armed insurgents, while those same insurgents used their knowledge of local urban and rural geographies to remain hidden from the eyes of the state. Development poles in “unexploited frontier regions” demonstrate how cartographic practices shaped labor dynamics, social structures, and environmental transformations through state-driven industrialization and mega-infrastructure projects.
In addition to technological innovations that shaped military strategies, surveillance efforts, and developmentalist aims, maps and visual imagery, such as aerial photographs and satellite imagery, also exerted a crucial rhetorical force in the ideological battlefields of the Cold War. Policymakers, environmentalists, social movements, and others used new ways of representing space to articulate different worldviews and imagined futures. Alternative approaches -like the Peters projection- challenged Eurocentric cartographic representations while simultaneously reinforcing certain development narratives about the "Third World." Medical geography and disease mapping created visual discourses that reinforced divisions between First and Third Worlds, functioning as "immutable mobiles" that carried both scientific information and ideological messages across contexts. Meanwhile, UN development cartography navigated tensions between scientific internationalism and national security concerns, often perpetuating colonial power dynamics under the guise of development. These new maps and technologies also shaped novel ideas about the boundaries between national and international space and guided efforts to remake national territorial sovereignty and empire amid decolonization and globalization. Finally, technology, knowledge, and images also moved across space through intellectual exchanges and debates that crossed the north and south, east and west in ways that defied notions of 'technological transfer.'
This workshop and proposed edited volume will seek to define a transdisciplinary and global field of Cold War cartography by generating a new set of questions, debates, and theoretical frameworks for analyzing the history of cartographic technologies and maps during the Cold War.
We invite scholars to submit proposals (300 words) on any aspect of cartographic sciences and technologies during the Cold War. In particular, we are interested in scholars from diverse career stages, and who reside in the global south.
Potential topics may include:
Analyzing the relationship between new kinds of geographic knowledge, technologies, and the generation of new ideas of territory and sovereignty
Assessing the use of cartographic technologies in counter-insurgency, political violence, armed conflicts
Investigating the relationship between cartographic practices and natural resource exploration and exploitation, particularly in the context of infrastructure and megaprojects
Analyzing the role of international bodies, such as the United Nations or the Pan-American Geography and History Association, in promoting new mapping technologies
Exploring how medical geography and disease mapping reinforced Cold War divisions between 'developed' and 'developing' nations
Analyzing the environmental impacts of development cartography in “frontier regions”
Investigating how cartographic practices contributed to the fragmentation or reorganization of labor structures in Cold War contexts
Examining the use of maps or visual imagery as part of global Cold War ideological debates
Examining alternative map projections -such as the Peters projection- as sites of ideological contestation
Comparing how similar cartographic practices and technologies produced different social, environmental, and political outcomes across regions
Exploring the legacy of Cold War cartographic practices on contemporary spatial representation and digital mapping technologies
We particularly welcome comparative studies that examine how cartographic practices produced different social, environmental, and political outcomes across regions such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and other parts of the Global South. Accepted papers will be invited to participate in workshop held at the University of Edinburgh in May 2026.
