Political Geography

An examination of Belgium's colonial venture in the Congo — its origins, its atrocities, and its enduring shadow over Central Africa today

More than 70 countries have now built border barriers. This final post argues that the 21st-century age of walls is not a new crisis — it is the overdue reckoning of a century of cartographic violence.

The Radcliffe Line divided India and Pakistan in 36 days; the 38th Parallel divided Korea in an afternoon. Both cuts were made by outsiders, both ignored geographic reality, and both wounds remain unhealed.

How British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot created the modern Middle East in a single secret agreement — and why that agreement still bleeds.

The Berlin Conference of 1884, where fourteen European powers drew straight lines through a continent they had never mapped. The consequences are still being counted.

Five posts tracing how colonial powers drew borders that ignored geographic logic — and how the resulting fractures still drive war, displacement, and the global age of walls.

Establishes the foundational argument: terrain, rivers, and climate are the original authors of political order. Without understanding these rules, we cannot understand the crime of ignoring them.

A data-driven look at which European powers colonized the most land, for the longest time, and what the numbers reveal about the structure of empire.