Paper long abstract:

Assumptions that underpin the cartographic discourse within countries and among them are deeply problematic. We propose to interrogate such assumptions within Ethiopia and between Ethiopia and Eritrea without lingering over the veracity of clashing claims and without prejudice to their appropriate adjudication.

Tigray-Amhara contestation over Wolkait-Tsegede (or Western Tigray) is one of several unresolved issues at the heart of the recent civil war in northern Ethiopia. Another issue complicating that war and one that awaits permanent resolution is the 1998-2000 border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea – even though a duly appointed arbitral court long issued a binding verdict. When juxtaposed, their legal substantive distinctions notwithstanding, these two vectors of conflict present a complex interplay of historical memory, semblance of legality and appeal to justice, blatant resort to and reliance on violence, and the ultimate realities of practical balance of power on the ground all to serve a desired cartographic outcome on the basis of historical maps. We challenge the putative objectivity of maps as accurate reflections of territorial, demographic, and political realities. Over the longue durée, notions of immutable, territorialized and bounded ethnic homelands – or even national territories – as timeless are untenable. Given the production of territorialized, bounded, and mapped ethnic homelands as a corollary of centralizing bureaucratic and administrative thrusts of modern states, we offer alternative reading of maps, in the present as in the past, as visual and textual artifacts that are intrinsically linked to the mapmaker(s) – their ideology, inspiration, worldview and motive, or those of their patron(s). We also examine the potentially different outcomes that follow from them under international law vis-à-vis domestic, administrative laws.