It is here, in the still, air-conditioned corridors of world haggling, that the largest struggle-over space on a map is the straight line. Not rivers and mountains border, but latitude and longitude lines, drawn by faraway cartographers and politicians who never set foot on the ground where they were dividing it.
It is satellite borders—cartographic lines drawn down from afar with little concern for human and cultural terrain below. Though they appear so neat and clean-lined on a map, these brush-stroked lines of sand are amongst the greatest sources of contemporary conflict, splitting folks apart, warring over natural resources, and underwriting perpetual cycles of political crisis at world cost. They were etched in the colonial past and enforced by power from above. The 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the "Scramble for Africa" and the Middle East by the European powers. British, French, and other country representatives would meet and, utilizing maps and tapes, partition continents into spheres of influence.
The absolute worst is the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, where a British diplomat and a French diplomat literally drew lines on a map of the Ottoman Empire and determined today's nations of Iraq, Syria, etc. And so too in the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, the European powers did literally draw straight lines across the African continent, bringing together wildly disparate—and sometimes competing—religious and ethnic groups into a single state and dispersing cohesive communities along different frontiers.
Colonial convenience and resource appropriation were the colonizers' driving purpose, not the establishment of practical, cohesive nations. The first side effect that these frontiers produced was splitting people apart. One aboriginal clan, ethnic community, or group that had lived alongside each other for generations was suddenly cut asunder between two, and sometimes three, separate colonial powers, which would go on to become independent nations. This has created a pervasive sense of grievance and a long-standing cause of irritation.
People were divided into different families. Nomadic groups' overnight stop at waterpoints and grasslands crossed an international boundary. It produces daily tensions and a profound bitterness towards the central government for having placed such foreign boundaries on them.
To give an example, the Somalis were distributed between Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti. The dream of uniting all the Somalis into a "Greater Somalia" has been one of the main causes of conflict in the Horn of Africa for decades now. The border is not a line, but a marking of a broken identity. Or, in other words, these borders put opposing groups with no common identity in the other's midst artificially. The contemporary Iraqi state, for instance, was formed by the unification of three autonomous Ottoman provinces with very diverse populations: Kurds in the north, middle Sunni Arabs, and southern Shia Arabs. These had been vying for generations, and the process of piling them all into a single hegemony, with one over the others on a rotational basis, within it held the formula for internal conflict, sectarian violence, and bloody dictatorship.
The satellite border sheltered the state, but was unable to forge a nation. The perpetual power struggles in such states, engineered by men, lead to domestic strife, internal oppression, and the foreign intervention option, a cycle from which it is nearly impossible to break out. The most unstable foundation for satellite border-fueled warfare is perhaps resource war. The diagonal line across the map doesn't concern itself with the location of oil fields, rivers, or crops. It just cuts them up.
This is where a valuable resource lands on the wrong side of a boundary, the target of fierce competition between the two countries. Niger's vast oil riches have been a source of frustration, partly because the colonial boundary did not overlap with the ethnic soil of the people who inhabit the land of oil.
Likewise, the Sudan-South Sudan conflict over the Abyei area of oil is caused by a colonial border that was unclear. Water is also a contentious subject. To Middle Easterners, access to the Jordan River basin is of immediate interest to Jordan, Palestine, and Israel, each driven by borders not created with hydrology in consideration. When prosperity and life depend on a resource that was gotten from another based on the line on the map, war is hardly preventable. Maintaining such intangible boundaries by post-colonial states only makes the problem worse. In the independence from colonies, newly forming state nations nearly all joined together to maintain the same colonial borders. The uti possidetis school of thought was accepted, that "as you hold, so shall you hold," in an attempt to exclude mere anarchy.
But that implied new nations inherited such disputed frontiers and must maintain them as inviolable and definitive. Border conflicts were the trademark of international relations. Forts are constructed along lines of longitude. Armed forces slog across deserts, consulting GPS coordinates to ensure no forward movement is wasted. Skirmishes erupt because a farmer had stepped over an imaginary line or because a village well just so happens to be placed in the wrong position on the other side of the line.
The nation-state, tied to its periphery, has to spend vast sums of resources in defending a line irrelevant to its citizens. New technology has now made these boundaries more visible and more disputed than ever in the past. GPS and satellite imaging enable one to precisely mark the border, but by doing that, it typically reveals the ridiculousness of the original demarcation. Satellite imagery will pick up an allied village split or a river that had to change course and redraw the de facto boundary, causing a fresh conflict.
Further, the technologies are employed to monitor and capture crossing points, affecting a militarization of such superfluous borders. Space surveillance, drones, and sensors transform symbolic borders into heavily defended areas of tension, where every crossing, however infinitesimal, can be noticed and can be a war of weapons or even a diplomatic firestorm. In short, the satellite borders drawn a century ago are not benign reminders of the past. They are unfixed, dynamic actors in modern geopolitics. They ferment ethnic fragmentation, introduce unviable states, and offer the battlefield for conflict over resources.
They compel nations to battle for ideology, and not nature-given boundaries, wastefully sidetracking resources that could otherwise be utilized in the developmental process and perpetually sustaining an environment of hostility with their neighboring nations. The conflict they give birth to is rarely a classic boundary conflict; it is a perpetual struggle over existence, belonging, and identity.
Straight lines on the map, inscribed in far-off capitals for some distant day, continue to shape—and kill—lives, demonstrating how a line cut across space can be an interval of hell.