Colonial Vestiges on the Map: A Rhetorical History of Development Cartography at the United Nations during Post-War Decolonization

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1948, the United Nations set a resolution affirming the centrality of cartography to its plans for world development in its member nations. Following that resolution, the UN established a cartographic office, regular publications, and most importantly, a program of regional conferences that would begin in “Asia and the Far East” in 1955 and would start in Africa in 1963. This essay offers a rhetorical history of the UN’s early attempts to create technical assistance and exchange programs for mapping in the 1950s and 1960s. The argument is that UN development cartography articulated a tension between an idealistic, scientific internationalism with more national security concerns, amidst a backdrop of colonial histories and emerging superpower influence. Such influences speak to the ways decolonizing nations adopted the rhetorical forms, like maps, of the so-called developed nations, and faced the inequities and asymmetries of development discourse.