Mapping Peace

We are the only species that draws lines on the ground and then forgets we drew them.
A geospatial scientist from Tamil Nadu recounts the moment a Landsat satellite image showed him something his school atlas never did: the Earth has no borders. The Cauvery River does not pause at the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu boundary. The monsoon does not consult a map before deciding where to rain. The aquifer beneath the Punjab is one body of water, shared by farmers on both sides of a line drawn in 1947 by a London barrister who had never visited India.
Mapping Peace traces what happens when a species that has spent ten thousand years dividing the Earth into parcels finally acquires the means to see what it has been dividing. The book moves in three stages. See: how satellite imagery reveals a planet that is continuous where our politics are fragmented. Share: how the opening of the Landsat archive in 2008, the rise of OpenStreetMap, and the use of satellite evidence in international courts transferred the power of observation from governments to citizens. Shift: how this shared seeing can change the way we think about territory, sovereignty, and belonging starting with the maps we give our children.
Drawing on the Cauvery and Mullaperiyar water disputes, the Nile Basin conflict, the destruction of villages in Darfur documented from orbit, the volunteer mapping of Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake, the Kerala floods of 2018, and India's own space programme from a rocket transported on a bicycle to sub-metre resolution satellites this book asks a question that is not scientific but human: once you have seen what the world looks like without borders, can you go on thinking about it in the same way?
Mapping Peace is not a call to abolish borders. It is a call to remember that we drew them.