![]() Other borders are organically curved and convoluted, where they have respected the land itself we see this in Nepal’s discrete outlining of the highest Himalayas, Chile’s vertical outlining of the Andes, or Lesotho’s curious ring around the South African highlands. ![]() ![]() Sometimes we build nations with straight lines – look at the artificial angles of southern Morocco/Mauritania’s contested territories, or the lines dividing the vast island of Papua these reflect the conceptual geometry of human statecraft. Ripped out of the imagination and projected on to the map, most nations are like those portrayed in the political scientist Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, or in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan – they are states with an ‘artificial soul’ made of ‘pacts and covenants’. Nations, states and empires are usually seen as man-made shapes on a map, lines imposed on to a living landscape that knows nothing of them.
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