Reflections from (South)Eastern Europe
counter-mapping, critical cartography, conflict, resistance
Power relations, hegemonic worldviews and regimes of visibility are represented and enacted through maps. This has been a long-term concern in critical cartography, which offers analytical and conceptual tools that can benefit peace and conflict research, particularly for rethinking peace and conflict processes from a spatial perspective and with the language of visual geopolitics. However, maps and their seductive powers can also be appropriated for the purposes of challenging dominant worldviews, addressing spatial injustices and visualising silenced perspectives. Originating in environmental and indigenous struggles, counter-mapping is increasingly being used in the context of peace and conflict. This piece explores its potential and its shortcomings by engaging with two cases: environmental legacies of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and civil resistance through mapping in Ukraine.
All images on this page are screenshots of the online atlas Visualising Conflict/Peace, a collaborative and interdisciplinary atlas which articulates and confronts different perspectives on conflict and cooperation in Eastern Europe through (geo)visualisations.
Mela Žuljević is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig (Department of Cartography and Visual Communication), working at the intersection of design, cartography and political ecology.
Sofia Gavrilova is a human geographer working at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, where she explores how maps shape the way we see—and argue about—the world.
Available in English: Counter-mapping in peace and conflict research
ABSTRACT
This entry elaborates on the relevance and the potentials of counter-mapping as an approach within peace and conflict research, allowing for visualising competing spatial claims while also making the power relations embedded in cartographic practices visible. Building on traditions of critical cartography, counter-mapping treats maps not as neutral representations but as political technologies that shape understandings and visions of territory, conflict and peace. Early work in critical cartography demonstrated how maps participate in the production of authority by stabilising particular spatial narratives and marginalising others. Counter-mapping challenges these established relations by appropriating the visual language and authority of cartography in order to contest hegemonic representations and articulate alternative spatial perspectives. Initially associated with Indigenous, environmental and community mapping initiatives, counter-mapping has expanded to include activist, artistic and scholarly practices that challenge unequal spatial knowledge production. In conflict environments, such practices provide tools for tracing how different actors inscribe competing histories, visions and claims onto the same regions and landscapes.
The entry expands on these discussions through an examination of two cases. The first case examines how counter-mapping can illuminate the intersections of conflict, environmental struggles and postwar political orders in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mapping played a central role during the peace talks in this country, which relied on maps as solutions to war, seeing the land as divisible ethnic space and describing unpopulated areas as empty or worthless at critical moments of territorial exchange. Such representations led to a territorial division which influenced the development of extractive activities and shaped current environmental struggles. The discussion reflects on the use of counter-mapping to trace the legacies of cartographic visions by linking environmental conflicts related to mining, hydropower and deforestation to the spatial legacies of wartime partition and neoliberal peacebuilding.
The second case looks at the development of counter-mapping initiatives related to civic, activist and scholarly resistance during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Civil society projects and artistic practices have produced alternative cartographies that foreground local knowledge, challenge territorial claims, and expose mechanisms of dispossession in occupied territories. Mapping fragmented administrative datasets – for example, records of housing declared ‘ownerless’ – reveals how occupation authorities reorganise property regimes through bureaucratic processes.
The entry concludes by reflecting on the limitations of counter-mapping. While it can challenge dominant spatial narratives, mapping inevitably involves choices about visibility and representation that may reproduce existing hierarchies or expose vulnerable actors. Expanding the analytical scope of counter-mapping to include other forms of spatial inscription therefore remains essential for understanding how spatial knowledge and resistance are produced in conflict contexts.
Counter-mapping in the context of conflict research can be a powerful and effective method for revealing connections and visualising confrontations between different positions and perspectives. More importantly, it provides tools for thinking about and articulating power relations, while supporting researchers in clearly positioning themselves within complex and politically contentious contexts. In our work, opting for counter-mapping as a method is strongly tied to an alignment with the approaches of critical cartography. Critical cartography (Harley, ; Wood, ; Crampton, , Crampton & Krygier, ) calls for analysing the powerful roles and uses of maps in shaping images and understandings of the world, as well as their various implications in conflicts, from their uses in asserting territorial claims to shaping military actions and influencing peace processes.
Critical analysis of maps spans different concerns, from the need to challenge cartographic conventions such as the use of Mercator projection and the imperial vision of the world it maintains, to pinpointing cartographic absences in order to reveal silenced and marginalised perspectives. By translating these concerns to the practice of mapmaking, counter-mapping focuses on scrutinising maps as instruments of power, governmentality and surveillance while appropriating their use to counterbalance or offset their monopoly by state or capital (Peluso, , p. 386). In particular, Crampton’s () account of understanding cartography through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality shifts attention away from maps as neutral technical tools and toward maps as political technologies that participate in governing territory, populations and knowledge.
Counter-mapping can therefore be understood as a set of practices that repurpose the techniques and visual authority of cartography in order to challenge dominant spatial narratives and make alternative territorial claims visible. While early discussions of counter-mapping often focused on Indigenous and community mapping initiatives, the concept has since expanded to include activist cartography, participatory mapping, artistic interventions and critical scholarly mapping projects that seek to expose the inequalities embedded in spatial knowledge. In conflict settings in particular, counter-mapping offers a way to trace competing spatial imaginaries and reveal how different actors attempt to inscribe their claims, memories and political visions onto the same landscapes. These approaches build on earlier critiques of cartographic authority that highlighted how maps function as instruments of power and knowledge production (Harley, ; Wood, ; Crampton & Krygier, ).
Counter-mapping in Conflict Environments and Environmental Conflicts
More and more environments globally are affected by the intersection of conflict and ecological crises. Counter-mapping is a helpful strategy in tracing and articulating how these processes overlap and mutually exacerbate, how they are interdependent, and how their effects are shaped by power relations and long-term vulnerabilities. It benefits from the traditions of spatial analysis, GIS and mapping in research on environmental justice, which contribute scientific evidence of spatial proximity to environmental violence (e.g. the work of INTERPRT on ecocide studies), or, as in the case of the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) project (Del Bene & Ávila ), support the analysis of environmental conflicts across different geographical scales. The EJAtlas is a collaborative platform where researchers, activists and communities can document environmental justice struggles worldwide in a structured, shared database. By systematising over 3,500 cases (documented by 2021) the platform enables analysis beyond individual case studies, helping to identify patterns, relationships and the broader political–economic forces shaping these conflicts. The atlas provides a platform and tools for researchers to use in their own counter-mapping initiatives, such as that developed by Ávila, Deniau, Sorman and McCarthy () in (counter)mapping renewables. These authors benefit from mapping to ‘situate the implementation of renewable energies in the broader process of economic liberalization that has been undergoing in the country and many other contexts of the Global South’ (Ávila, Deniau, Sorman, & McCarthy, , p. 1078). In their counter-maps the expansion of wind and solar power in Mexico is juxtaposed with local landscapes, people and resources to articulate uneven distributions of benefits and power.
Counter-mapping can also be combined with other methods, such as archival research and discourse analysis, to engage with the intersections of war legacies and environmental conflicts. The research project of Mela Žuljević on the connections of ‘peace cartography’ and current environmental conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) starts from the position of counter-mapping to engage with tracing warfare legacies in landscapes, revisiting maps as tools for seeing and dividing land. Maps were central to the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, so much so that the conflict has been described as map-driven (Crampton, , Komšić, , p. 97). International negotiators who led the peace talks largely pursued a cartographic solution to the war (Crampton, ; Toal & Dahlman, ). This approach rested on the assumption that the conflict was driven solely by ethnic hatred, a view shaped by orientalist interpretations of the region. As a result, maps reduced the question of peace to one shaped by appropriate ethnic distribution and military control of territory. In her work, Žuljević traced the uses and narrative accounts of mapping during the negotiations, showing that participants often described uninhabited, including natural, areas as empty and without value – and these spaces that were described as ‘empty’ and ‘worthless’ were then more readily conceded in territorial exchanges. Seeing and understanding land as empty via maps draws on the colonial idea of terra nullius (Zukas, ; Li, ), used to justify claims that supposedly uninhabited lands were available for European colonisation. Maps reinforced this fiction by depicting blank spaces to be filled, treating land outside state control as empty and uncontrolled natural environments rather than as spaces that were inhabited and used by people.
Peace in BiH was finally brokered with the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, signed in Dayton, Ohio and negotiated by US diplomats led by Richard Holbrooke. The agreement included a map which defined an Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL) to divide the country into two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Srpska. This line reflected the colonial and simplified vision of complex spatial reality in BiH: instead of envisioning a multiethnic future, the peace talks consistently saw the war as an issue of purely ethnic hatred which could only be resolved by giving each of the three dominant ethnicities their own space. In doing so, the international negotiators used maps as solutions for establishing viable borders, treating land as ethnic property and military terrain. The IEBL cut through cities, villages and streets, in some places running directly through family homes. It also crossed rivers, forests, mountains and other areas described during the negotiations as empty and without value.
In the postwar period, nationalist oligarchies that emerged from wartime power structures continued to capitalise on this territorial division. They benefited from the division since it enabled the further fragmentation of land into property for development and extraction, through what scholars and local experts have described as a ‘neoliberal peacebuilding’ (Mlinarević & Porobić, ). Everything that was protected as societal property in former Yugoslavia (land, factories, infrastructure etc.) was divided as war spoils between the nationalist parties, who then led the process of privatising this property purely for the interests of the ethno-oligarchy (Pugh, ), their party members and collaborating investors.
Since the 2020s a new wave of extraction-based development has allowed the political elites in both entities to continue this division of profits with controversial extractive projects mainly related to mining, construction and hydropower. The fragmentation of the country through the DPA benefitted this as it divided land use regulation and protection, as well as creating parallel energy and water systems. For example, forest exploitation often occurs in areas adjacent to the IEBL, where oversight is weaker or divided between parallel regulatory systems. This is the case on Mount Trebević near Sarajevo, which is designated under different protection categories in the two entities. In the construction of new hydropower projects in Republika Srpska, the elites qualify these plants as entity interests which are to be built on ‘inner territorial waters’ in order to diminish the protection of rivers as state property which cannot be divided on entity level.
By employing counter-mapping in conversations and collaborations with environmental activists in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Žuljević has produced maps that contextualise current environmental conflicts in relation to the legacies and continuities of war, as well as to neoliberal peace processes. One example is a map that appropriates an illustration of territorial issues in Dayton, published in a book written by the lead negotiator Richard Holbrooke entitled ‘To End a War’. In redrawing Holbrooke’s map with small modifications, the counter-mapping produced by Mela provides context for the pragmatic focus and devaluing of ‘empty’ land in negotiations, pointing to how land can be abstracted in order to be given away or exchanged more easily in negotiations.
Another map in the same project traces current environmental conflicts related to mining, deforestation and hydropower, while showing their relations to the mobilisation of the IEBL as a tool to circumvent land use and construction regulations, or to reactivate ethnic divisions for the benefit of private capital. This map challenges the narratives of progress that political elites and private investors build around these projects by juxtaposing them against resistance arguments and mapping them in relation to water flows, forests, protected landscapes and other ecological features that are typically absent from investor-produced maps. The map continuously evolves in collaboration with activists by critically looking at existing datasets, complementing them with alternative sources, and making decisions on what to include or exclude in order to produce various versions that are useful for activist strategies (e.g. maps for a documentary film, or for an online investigative dossier).
Counter-mapping and Civil Resistance in Ukraine
Since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, various forms of counter-mapping have emerged as tools for documenting resistance, contesting territorial narratives, and visualising the social dynamics of the war. While official military maps and state cartography focus primarily on frontlines and territorial control, civil society initiatives and artistic practices have produced alternative cartographic representations that foreground civilian agency, local knowledge, and the spatialities of resistance. These initiatives reflect broader insights from critical cartography, which emphasise that maps are not merely neutral depictions of territory but political technologies that shape how conflicts are perceived and understood (Harley, ; Wood, ; Crampton & Krygier, ).
One strand of such work involves mapping practices that document acts of civil resistance in territories affected by occupation and warfare. In the first months of the invasion, residents in numerous Ukrainian cities and towns organised protests, blockades, and other non-violent acts against Russian forces. Several research groups and civil society initiatives began to systematically document these events and represent them spatially through interactive maps and databases. These projects catalogue protests, demonstrations and other forms of civic mobilisation, illustrating how resistance unfolded across a wide geographic area despite military occupation and repression. By mapping these actions, researchers and activists challenge narratives that portray occupied territories as passive or politically acquiescent spaces. Instead, these visualisations reveal networks of local agency and collective action that remain largely invisible in conventional military cartographies of the war. In this sense, the maps function as what critical cartographers describe as ‘counter-cartographies’: spatial representations that contest dominant knowledge regimes and make alternative political realities visible (Peluso, ; Dalton, Shelton & Stallmann, Dalton, Shelton & Stallmann, ).
A second form of counter-mapping has emerged within artistic and cultural practices that appropriate cartographic imagery to critically engage with the war and its spatial narratives. Ukrainian artists have used maps, territorial diagrams and cartographic symbols as visual devices to interrogate the politics of borders, occupation and destruction. Through installations, digital projects and visual artworks, these practices reconfigure the authority traditionally associated with maps by exposing their ideological underpinnings and by foregrounding the lived experiences of war. Artistic cartographies often combine geographic data with personal testimonies, satellite imagery or symbolic representations of destroyed landscapes and displaced communities. In doing so, they transform maps from instruments of territorial control into platforms for reflecting on memory, trauma and belonging in wartime contexts. Scholars have increasingly highlighted such artistic interventions as important components of contemporary counter-mapping practices, as they expand the scope of cartography beyond technical representation and emphasise its role in shaping political imaginaries (Cosgrove, ; Wood, ).
Alongside these initiatives, digital volunteer projects have also produced widely circulated maps of the war. Platforms such as the open-source project DeepStateMap compile publicly available information and local reports to track changes along the frontlines. Although primarily focused on military developments, these initiatives demonstrate how mapping has become a decentralised and collaborative practice in wartime information environments. Together, these various initiatives illustrate how counter-mapping in Ukraine extends beyond the production of alternative maps to encompass broader practices of spatial knowledge production. By documenting civil resistance, reinterpreting territorial narratives through artistic practices, and enabling collaborative digital mapping, these projects challenge dominant representations of the war while foregrounding the multiple actors and experiences that shape contemporary conflict landscapes.
Guénola Inizan’s investigation into the ‘municipalisation’ of housing in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories provides a particularly instructive example of how counter-mapping can engage with bureaucratic data produced by occupying authorities themselves. Drawing on scattered lists of dwellings declared ‘ownerless’ and subsequently transferred to municipal ownership, her work demonstrates how official administrative documentation can be repurposed to reveal patterns of dispossession. Although these lists are fragmented, inconsistently formatted, and often published through disparate local channels, their aggregation makes it possible to trace both the scale and spatial distribution of housing seizures. Mapping these datasets exposes how a seemingly technical administrative process operates as a territorial strategy, allowing occupying authorities to reassign property rights while simultaneously obscuring the micro-practices through which buildings are identified as ‘abandoned’. In the case of Mariupol, for example, the consolidation of available lists suggests that approximately 11% of the surviving residential housing stock has been subjected to municipalisation. By spatialising these administrative traces, Inizan’s work transforms scattered bureaucratic artefacts into a cartographic narrative that reveals the geography of occupation governance and the mechanisms through which property regimes are being reshaped in occupied territories.
Repositioning Counter-mapping in Conflict Contexts
Counter-mapping, with all its critical and transformative potential, also has limitations and risks just like any other research method and tool. These relate to long-standing questions and concerns pertaining to mapping processes across time, even as suitable technologies and tools become widely available for appropriation and democratic use. Mapping as a technology of visibility entails making choices on what becomes visible or remains invisible, but focusing on this choice can obscure multiple issues which move beyond the visible/invisible dichotomy. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay () wrote about how the impetus for making visible reproduces the dichotomy between visibility and invisibility, pointing to the need to scrutinise the regimes of visibility which make such distinctions possible in the first place. If counter-mapping doesn’t critically engage with questions of how visibility is inscribed into its data sources and technologies, it can fall short in challenging hierarchies of power, or even reproduce some of their relations.
Making communities, local relations and resistances visible can also actively harm them, so the questions of what cannot be exposed and what needs to remain hidden are crucial in preparing any mapping projects. Finally, while access to mapping tools and technologies has been democratised in the recent decades, counter-mappers working in conflict settings must continuously return to the issues of data safety, privacy and sovereignty. While many tools we use might be open-source, digital mapping technologies are quickly absorbed into capitalist and surveillance projects. Tools can be used strategically, but discussions on these issues and anticipation of possible risks can require a lot of effort and preparation which local communities might not have privileged access to.
A further limitation concerns the conceptual framing of counter-mapping itself. Much of the literature assumes that challenging dominant cartographies necessarily involves producing alternative maps. However, many practices through which communities contest spatial power relations do not take the form of maps at all. Acts of spatial coding, such as graffiti, protest markings, informal signage, renaming practices, digital tagging or artistic interventions in urban space, can function as forms of spatial inscription that challenge official territorial narratives without adopting the conventions of cartography. In conflict environments especially, these practices often emerge precisely because formal mapping is either inaccessible, politically risky or epistemically constrained. Limiting the concept of counter-mapping to the production of alternative maps may therefore reproduce the epistemic authority of cartographic representation itself, privileging forms of knowledge that conform to cartographic standards while overlooking other spatial practices through which actors articulate territorial claims, memories or resistance. Expanding the analytical scope of counter-mapping to include such practices allows researchers to better capture the diverse ways in which spatial knowledge is produced, contested and communicated beyond the map as a visual object.
References
Azoulay, A. A. (2019). Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso Books.
Ávila, S., Deniau, Y., Sorman, A. H., & McCarthy, J. (2022). (Counter)Mapping Renewables: Space, Justice, and Politics of Wind and Solar Power in Mexico. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(3), 1056–1085. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211060657.
Azoulay, A. A. (2019). Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso Books.
Crampton, J. W. (1996). Bordering on Bosnia. GeoJournal, 39(4): 353–361.
Crampton, J. W. (2001). Maps as Social Constructions: Power, Communication and Visualization. Progress in Human Geography, 25(2), 235–252.
Crampton, J. W., & Krygier, J. (2006). An Introduction to Critical Cartography. ACME, 4(1), 11–33.
Cosgrove, D. (2005). Maps, Mapping, Modernity: Art and Cartography in the Twentieth Century. Imago Mundi, 57(1), 35–54.
Del Bene, D., & Ávila, S. (2023). Critical Mapping for Researching and Acting Upon Environmental Conflicts – The Case of the EJAtlas. In The Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology: A Companion in Honour of Joan Martinez-Alier, edited by S. Villamayor-Tomas & R. Muradian. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22566-6_17
Dalton, C., Stallmann, L., & Shelton, T. (2018). Counter-Mapping. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.
Harley, J. B. (1989). Deconstructing the Map. Cartographica, 26(2), 1–20.
Komšić, I. (2021). Tuđmanov haški profil – Udruženi zločinački poduhvat na BiH. Synopsis.
Li, T. M. (2014). What is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Investment. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39, 589–602. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12065
Mlinarević, G., & Porobić, N. (2022). The Peace That Is Not. Wilpf.org. Available at: https://bosnia-peace.wilpf.org/
Peluso, N. L. (1995). Whose Woods Are These? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode, 27(4), 383–406. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1995.tb00286.x
Pugh, M. 2016. Oligarchy and Economic Legacy in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Peacebuilding, 5, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2016.1231398.
Toal, G., & Dahlman, C. T. (2011). Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal. Oxford University Press.
Wood, D. (1992). The Power of Maps. Guilford Press.
Zukas, A. (2005). Terra Incognita/Terra Nullius: Modern Imperialism, Maps, and Deception. In Lived Topographies and their Mediational Forces, edited by G. Backhaus & J. Murungi. Lexington Books.
How to cite this entry:
Gavrilova, S. & Žuljević, M. (2026, April 28). Counter-Mapping in Peace and Conflict Research: Reflections from (South)Eastern Europe. Virtual Encyclopaedia – Rewriting Peace and Conflict. BMFTR – Network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19677300. https://rewritingpeaceandconflict.net/counter-mapping
Podcast
Hanna Al-Taher and Firoozeh Farvardin in conversation with Fabricio Rodríguez and Viviana García Pinzón
