Mapping the Gap at Coming Anarchy
Friday, March 10, 2006 at 3:03PM Those Anarchists are nothing if not ambitious! Curzon has a four-part series called Mapping the Gap. A quote from the Prelude:
Dr. Thomas Barnett divides the world into two categories: the functioning core and the chaotic gap. Where are the borders of this chaotic region?...I like the concept of Core v.s. Gap. I just don't like how the border is classified. What makes countries like Turkey and Thailand part of the Gap but places such as Lesotho and Tibet in the Core? Equally, it seems ludicrious to include Chengdu, China (an industrial hole) in the Core and Ankara, Turkey (a developed quasi-European city) in the Gap. And it goes beyond that--how can you tell when the borders of the Gap shrink or expand?
You should check out the comments on this one which includes TPMB regular ZenPundit.
Curzon goes on to 'flesh out' the Gap with posts on War Risk Insurance, Homosexuality Laws, and Ungoverned Areas. Among other things, these posts feature some really nice, homemade maps. Go look! ;-)
I, for one, hope Curzon has more of these forthcoming. Any other data-sets like this come to mind for mapping the Gap?
[Tom's unavailable right now, but maybe we'll get some commentary out of him later...]
UPDATE: Lexington Green sends in a link to a post he did with a picture of 'An electromagnetic spectrum satellite photo of global lines of communication, 1999'. Lines us pretty well with Core/Gap. Keep 'em coming!
Reader Comments (2)
One such project with maps is being done by the authors of the "Gates of Vienna" blog, article link is http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/03/bloody-borders-project.html
The Bloody Borders Project link is at
http://chromatism.net/bloodyborders/
I use a service called "ClustrMaps" on my weblog, which tracks the locations of visitors to my site by placing little red dots on a global map. I once remarked that the spread of dots was also a "green network," since virtually all visitors to my site come from areas on the globe which are also the greenest (vegetation, moisture.) Even within America, in which most of my visitors live, the driest areas provide virtually no visitors.
But also, I wondered if the spread of dots might be used to represent connectivity, since obviously the areas without much Internet connectivity provide the fewest visitors. I get quite a few visitors from America, Europe, China, Southeast Asia, and Australia, but much, much fewer visitors from Africa, the Middle East, and South America (although I've been getting more from South America lately.)
My weblog's a minor blog, with few visitors compared to Tom's blog and many other blogs I read. But I've visited ClustrMaps for other sites which show a very similar spread to my own. You can check out my map at the ClustrMap site:
http://clustrmaps.com/counter/maps.php?url=http://phaticcommunion.com&type=small&clusters=no&map=world
It's interesting to note that even in China, most of my visitors are from the coastal regions -- so interior China is not as well connected, may be similar to Africa and central South American regions?