Fragile Borders and Where to Draw Them: How British Mapmakers Immortalised Conflict in the Middle East

PHOTO: “Mappa Della Penisola Arabica” by Emin Huric on Unsplash

It was the summer of 1947 when Cyril Radcliffe, a British solicitor who had never travelled east of Paris, was handed 175,000 square miles of South-Asian territory and tasked with drawing borders for the emerging nations of Pakistan and India. 

On his shoulders sat the fate of the Indian subcontinent, as the strokes of his pen defined where one nation began and another ended; each an intricate mosaic of cultures, religions, languages and lineages. 

In the five weeks that followed, lines were drawn in haste and hesitancy by a solicitor, who by his own admission, had limited familiarity with Bengal and Punjab. The blade of his pen cut unforgivingly across mountains, communities, families and lives, dividing entire populations with his limited knowledge of the mechanisms which held those societies in place. 

Triggering one of the largest forced migrations in human history, the violence left in the wake of one man’s cartography resulted in the displacement of 15 million people and the tragic deaths of over 2 million people. 

Radcliffe departed the Indian subcontinent on the day the lines were announced, destroying his papers and never returning. For the remainder of his lifetime, he refused to discuss the matter. 

Across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, the borders that define modern states and the conflicts that dictate modern headlines trace back to decisions made by British officials who were, at best, in a hurry, and at worst, deliberately designing systems of division that would ensure no territory could ever mount a unified resistance. 

To understand why so many of the world’s most catastrophic conflicts feel permanent, we must follow the ink lines back to the men who drew them.

Are the Sykes the limit? The Horror of the Sykes-Picot Agreement

States were created, but nations were not”

– Historian David Fromkin 

It was a rare occurrence for colonial borders drafted in 20th Century Britain to be the product of geographical, cultural, or even logical observations, and there exists no better evidence of this than the Sykes-Picot agreement.

Similar to Radcliffe of Britain, when 36-year old Mark Sykes arrived on the eastern Arabian coast to settle disputes of Kurdish territory between ​​Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Assyrians, Armenians, and others, he did so whilst inexperienced in cartography and against the wishes of the resident Arab population.

As simple as it may sound, when Sykes picked up his pen and literally drew a line on the map saying, “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk”, he set in motion a series of events that would echo through Lebanon’s civil war with 120,000 killed, Syria’s civil war with over 500,000 killed and half the population displaced, and the Iraq war with over 900,000 dead. 

The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a clandestine pact aimed to divide and partition the lands of the Ottoman Empire, drawing artificial borders across the Middle East with little regard for the region’s ethnic, religious, or tribal divisions.

The borders cut the Kurdish population among four states, ensuring Kurdish national aspirations would destabilise the region for a century, while cramming religious groups into artificial states that often did not reflect their historical or cultural identities.

For example, Britain created Iraq by combining three Ottoman provinces of Mosul (majority Kurdish), Baghdad (majority Sunni Arab) and Basra (majority Shia Arab), and installed a Sunni Arab monarchy despite the fact that Shia Arabs constituted approximately 55% of the population and Kurds constituted another 20%. Today, the Iraqi political system is unstable, reaching the brink of collapse due to state ownership rivalry between the Sunni minority and Shia majority.  

The arrangement had no democratic basis, no ethnic logic, and no particular precedent. It did, however, fit neatly into Britain’s strategic need for a compliant government controlling the Mesopotamian oil fields and the route to India.

As such, these arbitrary lines sowed the seeds of future conflicts, creating nations with diverse groups of conflicting interests and loyalties; guaranteeing over a century’s worth of turmoil for the people of the Middle East.

As British Advisor T.E. Lawrence noted, the region’s divisions would ensure “a tissue of small jealous principalities incapable of cohesion”. Although state lines were drawn to be temporary, decades of war later, they’re the only permanent aspect about the vastly unstable region.

It was obvious by the end of the century that in deciding the future of Southern Asia, nobody had consulted a governing ruler on the ground, only a wooden ruler on a desk.

PHOTO: Various flags of Iraq-Iran’s Islamic Sects now governed by the Sunni Majority, Nikon Corporation on Unsplash

Fool me thrice

If the map itself was a blunt instrument, the diplomacy surrounding it was a masterclass in manipulation. 

Britain, over the course of the First World War, made three mutually contradictory promises. 

First, the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence in 1916 promised Arab independence in exchange for revolting against the Ottomans, with the exact boundaries of the promised kingdom deliberately left vague. 

Second, the aforementioned Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916 secretly agreed to divide the same territories between Britain and France. 

Third, the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 was issued, as journalist Ramzy Baroud observes, when “Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire”, promising British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” 

These three promises were fundamentally incompatible. The Arab Revolt, which began in June 1916 under Sharif Hussein of Mecca, was launched on the basis of the first promise, even as that promise was being secretly negated by the second. When the Bolsheviks revealed the Sykes-Picot Agreement’s text in 1917, Arab leaders felt betrayed, and described it as evidence of Western duplicity. 

The Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement represent the original sin that continues to haunt the region and more than any other great power, Britain is the most responsible for the unfolding tragedies of the Palestinians and the Arab world in general.

Modern Kashmir on the edge of a Cliffe 

Returning to the present day, Kashmir, the disputed land between Pakistan and India, faces a staggering economic, military and human cost. 

Bilateral trade between India and Pakistan, which fell from $2.41 billion in 2018 to $1.2 billion by 2024, represents only a fraction of what the nations could achieve, as economists estimate that “normal” trade relations could add $35 billion annually to the combined GDP of both nations. 

But why do these tensions persist? 

In 1947, Radcliffe drew a 553-kilometre zigzag line through Punjab and a 4,096-kilometre line through Bengal, splitting culturally cohesive regions along religious lines, in a process described by academic Sumanta Banerjee as a “sloppy surgery.” 

The region of Kashmir, which Radcliffe by his own admission was “not even aware of” and heard about only after returning home, has since produced four full wars between India and Pakistan, as well as a line of control that functions as a de facto border without ever being formally settled.

Despite being drawn over 75 years ago, the inconsistent territory lines are a permanent condition of diplomatic fragility, in which any security incident, including a terrorist attack or even a minor skirmish, can immediately collapse diplomatic relations that have been painstakingly built. 

This was seen following the 2025 Pahalgam terror attack in Kashmir and India’s subsequent Operation Sindoor. Pakistan’s exports to India, which had already collapsed from $547 million in 2019 to just $480,000 in 2024, were effectively zeroed out entirely as both countries closed the Wagah-Attari border crossing and suspended diplomatic missions. 

A five-week decision made by a man with no map experience and no return ticket has, more than three quarters of a century later, become a structural feature of two nuclear-armed economies, and a source of misery for the inhabitants of both nations. 

By intentionally neglecting Kashmir’s critical geographical diplomacy, Britain didn’t just cross a line. It invented several, then left them for others to cross.

PHOTO: “Jammu and Kashmir in 1954 Political Map of India” by Survey of India, Government of India on Unsplash

Past Perimeters, Present Peace and the Palestine Problem

It is convenient to view the cartographic issues of Colonial Britain in a past light as a catalogue of wrongs; however, the body counts arising from border conflicts on historical colonial British territories are being updated as we speak. 

The present-day consequences are catastrophic in scale. Palestine was placed under British administration by the League of Nations in 1922, with the Balfour Declaration simultaneously obliging Britain to protect “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” 

As it turns out, promising the same land to two different parties was proving extremely challenging, and when Britain abandoned the Mandate in 1947, the UN partition plan produced an Arab-Israeli war within hours of taking effect, displacing approximately 700,000 Palestinians in what became known as the ‘Nakba’. The 1967 war then placed Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli military occupation, producing the territorial conditions that still define the conflict today.

Although there are many compounding factors, it can be argued that the borders in the region that divide land between Israeli occupation and Palestinian groups promote conflict in themselves. The eastern and perimeter border crossings of the Gaza Strip established by the UK and UN, specifically the Rafah Border Crossing (which connects Palestinians to Egypt as an ally), the Kerem Shalom Crossing (the cargo-gate for trade), and the Erez Crossing (pedestrian access to Israel), enforce the long-standing blockade and restrict movement. As such, Hamas can be seen to act in response to the blockades imposed at these borders to protect Palestinian Statehood. 

Now, since October 7, 2023, at least 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, with over 169,000 injured; figures that Brown University notes are likely a significant undercount given bodies are still buried in rubble. At least 20,000 children are among the dead with one child killed every hour for two years and approximately 1.9 million people,  90% of Gaza’s population,  have been displaced.

Is Reform possible? 

None of this is simply a matter of historical inertia. 

The borders persist partly because international law entrenches them under the principle of uti possidetis, where boundaries inherited at independence presumptively remain in place – and partly because they are actively useful to the governments that inherited them.

However, borders that persist as a “contested border” is electoral currency. A live dispute with a neighbour justifies military budgets, suppresses internal dissent, and gives governments a permanent supply of nationalist grievance on demand.

Therefore it is tempting, at this point in the analysis, to conclude that borders simply need to be redrawn. This conclusion is understandable and almost entirely impractical.

Full border revision via self-determination does happen, as seen in South Sudan (2011), Eritrea (1993), and Bangladesh (1971). However, each case is exceptional, and each carries the precedent risk that dozens of other separatist movements will immediately point to it as justification for their own claims. Opening the borders question globally is less a solution than an invitation to chaos.

The most compelling proof of concept, however, is one Britain was itself involved in and which did not require a single line to be redrawn. 

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 defused a colonial-era partition conflict through power-sharing and an effectively invisible border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, without sovereignty transfer or cartographic revision. The agreement acknowledged competing political aspirations while creating the institutional conditions for coexistence. 

Despite not being a perfect model, it required decades of violence before political will for compromise emerged. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that the conflicts colonial cartography creates are not, in the end, permanent. They are political, and political problems have political solutions.

Nevertheless, although a border can be redrawn, even resolved disputes leave residue, and resentments drawn by the pen are rarely extinguished in the people.

PHOTO: Bangladesh East Timor Visa Exemption Agreement Signing in 2024, Bangladesh Press Information department on Wikimedia Commons 

Mapped in Ink, Maintained in Blood

A British lawyer who had never been east of Paris drew some lines on a map in five weeks and refused to talk about it for the rest of his life. 

A British colonial administrator settled border disputes in desert tents with a red pencil and a firmly paternal tone. 

Two diplomats with a chinagraph pencil divided an empire over a series of afternoon meetings. 

These were the founding cartographic acts of a region that generates more than a quarter of the world’s oil and has been in a state of near-continuous conflict for the better part of a century. 

It is often argued by members of the international community that the fact that the borders are extraordinarily difficult to renegotiate is a testament to the wisdom of the cartographers. 

They neglect that such borders were not designed to last, but rather to be convenient for the British administrators managing an exit, for French officials protecting commercial interests through Lebanon, or for British High Commissioners when meetings take too long. 

If you want to know who is responsible for the modern Middle East, don’t look for a general. Look for a man who was home in time for tea. 

PHOTO: “There is nothing left in this place” – Mahmoud Salaiman in reference to Daraa, Syria, Mahmoud Sulaiman on Unsplash