Global Histories of Cold War Cartographies

Cartographic technologies and sciences underwent revolutionary transformations during the global Cold War, as military officials, scientists, governments, private corporations, universities, and think tanks sought to define and adapt to world political and historical contexts. 

New technologies—such as radar navigation, satellite imagery, the World Geodetic System, and GPS—responded to the demands of new forms of global warfare, including counterinsurgency, but were also repurposed for civilian and developmental ends specific to the Cold War. 

In regions such as Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where the Cold War was anything but “cold”, cartographic technologies played a crucial role in defining battlefields. Military and paramilitary forces sought to control and conquer territories and eradicate armed resistance, while the latter used their knowledge of local urban and rural geography to remain hidden from the state’s gaze. 

Development poles in “untapped frontier regions” evidence how cartographic practices shaped labour dynamics, social structures, and environmental transformations through state-driven industrialisation processes and mega-infrastructures. 

Beyond technological innovations that influenced military strategies, surveillance efforts, and developmental goals, maps and visual images—such as aerial photography and satellite imagery—exerted a fundamental rhetorical force in the ideological fields of the Cold War. 

Policymakers, environmentalists, social movements, and others used new forms of representing space to articulate different worldviews and imagined futures. In this context, alternative approaches—such as the Peters projection—challenged Eurocentric cartographic representations, whilst simultaneously reinforcing certain development narratives regarding the “Third World”. 

Medical geography and disease mapping created visual discourses that reinforced divisions between the First and Third Worlds, functioning as “immutable mobiles” that transmitted scientific and ideological information across diverse contexts. 

On the other hand, development cartography promoted by the United Nations navigated tensions between scientific internationalism and national security concerns, in many cases perpetuating colonial dynamics through development discourse. 

These new cartographies and technologies also influenced innovative ideas about the boundaries between national and international space, guiding efforts to transform territorial sovereignty and empire in a context of decolonisation and globalisation. 

Likewise, technology, knowledge, and imagery moved through space via intellectual exchanges and debates that criss-crossed North and South, East and West, challenging conventional notions of “technology transfer”. 

This workshop and edited volume will seek to define a transdisciplinary and global field of Cold War cartography, promoting new questions, debates, and theoretical frameworks to analyse the history of cartographic technologies and maps in this period.