Diplomacy in Two Trench Coats: Why the UN’s New Map Still Doesn’t Fit
- J. Harlan Briggs
- 8 hours ago
- 6 min read
Or, How We Ended Up Arguing Over Which Size Trench Coat to Put on a World That Refuses to Stand Still
Trying to fit the world into one map is a bit like buttoning two trench coats onto a globe—no matter how you tug the sleeves, someone’s left out in the cold.
By J. Harlan Briggs
Somewhere around fourth grade, a teacher rolled down tSomewhere around fourth grade, a teacher rolled down the classroom map, tapped Greenland, tapped Africa, and told us: these are not actually the same size, and here is why the map does that. I remember being a little thrilled by it — the specific thrill of learning that the authority in the room was willing to tell you where the official version cut corners. It didn’t wound me. It taught me the map had an agenda, and that the room was willing to say so out loud. That, more than the map itself, is the thing I’ve been trying to relocate ever since: not a corrected map, but an adult willing to name the correction.
I bring this up because, in a world teetering on the edge of climate crisis, war, and economic collapse, the United Nations has at last summoned the courage to vote on a map. Yes, a map. And, tellingly, everyone involved managed to navigate the discussion without once saying the quiet part out loud: that almost no one in the room actually cares how big Greenland looks, except as a matter of national pride or diplomatic grandstanding.
A Vote, Rendered Without Comment
(A bureaucratic interlude)
On September 4, 2026, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution (164 to 1) encouraging wider use of the Equal Earth projection, a map that shows countries at their true relative size, instead of the 1569 Mercator projection (built for sailors and quietly misleading schoolchildren ever since). Six countries abstained: Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine. None explained their reasoning publicly, which is its own kind of statement. One country voted no: the United States, whose deputy representative to the UN's Economic and Social Council dismissed the resolution as mocking the institution's real purpose, calling it one of the “barnacles” attached to the UN's actual work, a sentence that manages to insult the vote while accidentally admitting the institution has other things it could be doing.
France went further than a simple yes. Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced his ministry would drop Mercator entirely, switching to the Eckert IV projection, a different equal-area map than the UN's recommended Equal Earth, but grounded in the same logic of showing continents at their true size. His framing matched the campaign’s: the US, Russia, and China, he said, “take on a disproportionate visual importance compared with Africa, Latin America, or South-East Asia.” The resolution’s own text, for what it’s worth, goes even further, describing the correction as “an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation,” language doing exactly the kind of extra psychological lifting this piece is about to spend several paragraphs being suspicious of.
Togo’s foreign minister, Robert Dussey, put the stakes plainly: “A map is indeed a technical tool, but is also an instrument of knowledge and representation that shapes how people and continents perceive themselves.” He went on to argue that “correcting the map” also means “correcting a perception.” It’s an evocative argument, and exactly the conviction that first pulled me into this debate. The trouble begins when an evocative argument starts being treated as an established psychological fact. UN video: Robert Dussey on the adoption of the “Correct the Map” resolution
The Fine Print That Was Never Required
Here’s the detail that actually stopped me: nobody has ever been obligated to disclose any of this, not in 1569, not now.
When Mercator published his map, he wasn’t exactly hiding anything. The full title translates to “a new and augmented description of Earth, corrected for the use of sailors,” and the map itself is covered in dense legend text explaining the projection and its navigational purpose. He was upfront about its use. What he never wrote anywhere on it was the plainer, more useful warning: this will make everything near the poles look bigger than it is, so don’t use this to compare continents. That omission wasn’t dishonesty. It simply wasn’t required, and still isn’t.
Every flat map involves the same tradeoff: no projection can preserve size, shape, and direction all at once. That’s why alternatives to Mercator keep getting proposed instead of simply being fixed. There is still no standard, then or now, requiring a published map to disclose its distortions. Every “note: this map distorts area” you’ve ever seen in a textbook margin was somebody’s choice, not an obligation.
That’s what made my fourth-grade teacher’s candor feel like a rare privilege. She wasn’t following a rule; there isn’t one.
A Word from Constance Ashworth on the Vexing Matter of Ones Continent
[A brief interruption, in a register the reader did not ask for.]
One is given to understand that a Continent has, for some four hundred and fifty-seven years, been wearing the wrong size, and that the fashionable among us are now correcting this at last. The garment in question is called the Equal Earth projection, first tailored in 2018 by cartographers who found the previous alternative — the Gall-Peters projection, a garment briefly favored by the Boston public schools — to be structurally a bit much. For those wishing to see the alteration firsthand, visit thetruesize.com and drag Greenland onto Africa, watching it shrink to the approximate size of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which, one gathers, is the entire point.
We now return you to Mr. Briggs, who has Feelings About Evidence.
The Part Where I
Stop Being Funny For A Minute
Here’s where the map story usually shifts, and I think the pivot is worth catching in the act.
Fara Ndiaye, co-founder of the advocacy group Speak Up Africa — one of the two organizations, alongside Africa No Filter, that led the “Correct the Map” push — has said that the Mercator distortion affects African identity and pride, and that this lands hardest on children who meet the map early in school. It’s a claim made with total institutional confidence, repeated in coverage of the campaign without much pushback, and it is, as far as I can find, completely untested.
Not weakly supported. Untested. Here is what actually exists:
A 2020 study surveying more than 130,000 people worldwide found that map projection does measurably shift how accurately people estimate country sizes — but the researchers were careful to note this wasn’t strong enough to say a person’s mental map is simply a copy of whichever projection they grew up with. Two years later, a separate study by cartography researchers Daniel Montello and Sarah Battersby went further, reporting no evidence at all for what’s sometimes called the “Mercator effect” on people’s recalled sense of area — the specific mechanism everyone assumes is happening. They did find effects on people’s sense of direction, just not on the size-judgment claim that gets repeated the most.
Neither study is about children. Neither is about pride, identity, or self-esteem. Nobody has run that study on African schoolchildren or anyone else, in either direction. What exists is a body of research on whether maps distort spatial memory (contested), and a completely separate body of research on how children develop national pride (real, but unconnected to cartography), and an advocacy claim sitting in the gap between them, borrowing the authority of both while being tested by neither.
The frustrating thing is that none of this was necessary. The map is wrong: Africa is roughly fourteen times larger than Greenland, yet Mercator shrinks that gulf until they seem like peers. That is a measurable error, reason enough to fix a wall map. Reaching past a solid factual case for an untested psychological claim doesn’t strengthen the argument; it just gives critics a softer target than the map itself.
Returning To The Classroom
What shaped me wasn’t the claim that “the map hurt you and you didn’t know it.” It was: “the map is imperfect, here’s specifically how, and here’s who’s still deciding what goes up on the wall next.” One is a disclosure; the other is a diagnosis nobody asked for, and nobody has actually tested.
Fix the map. It’s overdue by about four and a half centuries. But don’t tell the kids it was quietly shaping them all along; tell them it was wrong, as my teacher did, and let them discover the charge of that candor themselves.
Further reading, for anyone who wants to keep pulling the thread:
UN General Assembly resolution coverage — CNN
France's switch to Eckert IV, the abstaining countries, Barrot's statement — Euronews
The resolution's actual text — UN document (French)
Full vote coverage and Dussey's remarks — NPR
The US objection, in full — The Hill
The "Correct the Map" campaign and its critics — The Peninsula Qatar (AFP)
Equal Earth projection, background — Wikipedia
The map-perception study — Lapon, Ooms & De Maeyer, 2020 (DOI)
The "no Mercator effect" rebuttal study — Montello & Battersby, 2022
Drag Greenland onto Africa yourself — thetruesize.com
The 14x figure, explained — Visual Capitalist
Robert Dussey — UN Media Stakeout: Cleaned Transcript, September 4, 2026 — Readable transcript, prepared from the UN Web TV recording and checked against the available automated transcript.
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