PRESENTATION at RGS-IBG Conference: Peace Agreement Maps as Conflicting Visions of the Future

This paper will delve into a collection of maps produced, used, and circulated by various actors during the peace talks and agreements in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the 1990s. Various scholars described the war in BiH as map-driven: maps served as key instruments both in justifying conflict and negotiating peace but were also constitutive to the future development of territorial, spatial, and socio-environmental relations. The paper focuses on these maps as visions for the future, to explore how their design space was constructed through conflict and negotiation of different perspectives on the division of the country. Previous work by scholars engaged with multiple perspectives in this conflict cartography mainly by focusing on the confronted positions of the different conflict parties on how the country should be divided. This research looks more in-depth into how such perspectives were also shaped, modified, or challenged in the mapping process, by external actors, tools, and technologies used, as well as alternative visions of the future. In particular, the paper will focus on what these different perspectives, observed in maps and their contextual information, reveal about the underlying assumptions of socio-environmental relations and visions of landscape futures.