Africa and the World Map: Six Things Everyone Got Wrong About the UN Vote

Graphic by PolGeoNow, starting from maps by Geordie Bosanko, Justin Kunimune, Canuckguy, and Martin23230. You can take and use this image for free, as long as you follow the rules of the CC BY-SA license, and link back to our site when possible – but please consider buying us a coffee if it's useful to you!

Article by Evan Centanni 

Maps at the United Nations: What Really Happened 

The internet has gone wild this month with news about a United Nations (UN) General Assembly resolution, passed on September 4, to endorse what headlines called a “new world map”. (A General Assembly resolution is a kind of official statement about what most of the world’s countries think or want.)

Unfortunately, most reporting on the UN action has been a mix of exaggerations, misunderstandings, and bad simplifications, with people getting mostly the wrong impressions about what happened. And as in past cases, the media mostly didn’t interview the actual map experts. But not to worry – we have one of those here!

US, Ukraine, and More: Which Countries Criticized the UN’s World Map Vote, and the Truth About Why

The UN General Assembly Hall in New York City, where this month's map vote took place. Unlike the smaller UN Security Council, the General Assembly has little power to enforce decisions on countries, and instead exists more for building international consensus, setting goals, and overseeing projects. Photo by PolGeoNow, from November 2019 (contact us for permission to use it).

UN Map Debate: The truth about the US and Ukrainian arguments, and what other countries said

As you might have heard, the United Nations (UN) held a vote early this month about maps, discouraging the use of the mapmaking method known as the Mercator projection, which produces world maps that hugely exaggerate the size of places far from the equator (like northern Europe, Siberia, Canada, and Antarctica). The idea is that this is unfair to countries like those in Africa, which look smaller than they really are compared to countries in more-powerful Europe. The Equal Earth projection was promoted as a good alternative, because it perfectly preserves relative sizes (while introducing other kinds of distortion).

Unfortunately, even major news media got key details wrong – for example, the UN didn’t officially “adopt” or “replace” any map or projection. For the truth about what it really did, check out our separate article on six things most people misunderstood about the UN decision. If you have opinions about map projections, you should definitely read that first! But if you're looking for the details on which countries said what, you're already in the right place...

The USA is Still a WHO Member

Update: On July 7, 2020, the US government under President Donald Trump officially began the one-year process of withdrawing from the WHO. However, the next US president, Joe Biden, then canceled the process on January 20, 2021, almost six months before the country would have actually left. The US never officially stopped being a member of the WHO, and is no longer planning to leave.

The World Health Organization includes almost every country in the world, coordinated by six different regional offices (public domain map; source).

Is the US leaving the WHO?

Last weekend US president Donald Trump made a statement that seemed to imply the country was withdrawing from membership in the World Health Organization (WHO).

Citing accusations that the body is overly influenced by China, the US president said "We will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization".

Bu what exactly does that mean?

Fact Check: Is the AfCFTA the World's Second Biggest Free Trade Area?

The AfCFTA is planned to cover almost all of Africa, but doesn't yet.

The recently-created African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) now has 28 full member countries, with 26 more signed on to the project as future members.

That's a lot of members for a free trade area, and everyone seems to be calling it the "world's biggest free trade area since the WTO". But is that label really accurate?

(If you don't want to read the whole article, scroll down to the conclusion for a short summary.)

Maps of How Scotland's Regions Really Voted

Good geographers know that maps can lie to you. Every map emphasizes some aspects of a place at the expense of others, giving it a lot of power to lead careless readers astray. Maps of Scotland's recent independence referendum are misleading us about the reality, even if not intentionally.

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Map by Evan Centanni, based on blank map by TUBS and NordNordWest (CC BY-SA)

By Evan Centanni

Misleading Maps
By now you've probably heard the results of Scotland's independence referendum: voters chose "no" by a solid margin of 55% to 45%. Check out our previous article to learn more about what would have happened if Scotland had voted "yes".

Maps like this one from the BBC and this one from Wikipedia have popped up since the results came out, showing how each of Scotland's council areas voted. Most of the country is in red for "no", with a few "yes" areas in green.

But if one area went 51% for "yes", and another 51% for "no", those two areas actually voted almost identically - yet contrasting red/green maps make us feel like they're polar opposites (not to mention that one-in-thirty readers has trouble seeing the difference between red and green).

How the Councils Really Voted
Whether each area's people voted just over or just under 50% in favor isn't actually that important. What matters is how far the balance was tipped in each region. This is not the U.S. presidential election, where the final vote is actually made by delegates obligated to go by the majority in each state. All the votes across Scotland were pooled together to determine the result, so which side of the 50-yard line each area came out on has no effect .

How Sharply Divided is Ukraine, Really? Honest Maps of Language and Elections

There's no question that Ukraine's current crisis arose from major political divisions in the country, and it's true that language is an issue. But some online news websites have sensationalized and exaggerated these divisions through misleading maps. PolGeoNow offers a pair of maps that better communicate the blurriness of the supposed lines between western and eastern Ukraine. 

(For a map of current events from January up to this week, including protester control, government occupations, and the Russian invasion, purchase our premium map of the Ukraine crisis or become a member.)

A more honest map of Ukraine's 2010 presidential election. By Evan Centanni.

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Article by Evan Centanni 

Misleading Ukraine Maps
In January, the Washington Post's Max Fisher wrote a popular map-illustrated blog post about the political and linguistic divisions fueling Ukraine's crisis, then at the height of its pro-Europe protest phase. Later, CNN followed the Post's lead and published a similar set of maps. However, the maps in both articles are designed in a way that makes the divisions look much sharper and more black-and-white than they really are. There's not, as Fisher preposterously claims, "an actual, physical line" splitting Ukraine in half. Instead, there's a gradual shading of mixed populations whose ethnic identities and voting history don't always correlate to the country's current political divisions.