---
title: "Who Gets To Make The World Look Big?"
description: "Look at a map of the world. Most likely, you are looking at the Mercator projection. In September 2026, the UN General Assembly voted 164-1 to promote the use…"
url: https://www.independentpress.com/article/who-gets-to-make-the-world-look-big
date: 2026-10-09
categories: ["Politics","Social"]
author: "Abbie Ahn"
---

# Who Gets To Make The World Look Big?

![images](https://images.ctfassets.net/ewtdlsoyixc1/7dBzUXSx4wreGl7wjZYh1u/56b3d45b1f8f002c7ed0124fe0fa9a1a/abbie_ahn.jpeg)

Look at a map of the world. Most likely, you are looking at [the Mercator projection](https://www.britannica.com/science/Mercator-projection). It is the familiar rectangular map that has appeared in classrooms, textbooks, and online for generations. Europe sits comfortably near the center. Alongside it, North America looks enormous. Africa looks significantly smaller, with Greenland being roughly the same size. In reality, Africa is fourteen times larger than Greenland.

The Mercator map is wrong, but not in the way we usually mean when we call something wrong. 

The Mercator projection was designed in the sixteenth century by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator as a navigational tool to help sailors navigate the oceans during the Age of Exploration. Its purpose was not to make Europe look powerful. But maps do more than help us navigate. They teach us what the world looks like. And when a particular representation becomes so familiar that we stop questioning it, distortion can become perception. 

This contention was most recently contested in the United Nations’ (UN) recent fight over map projections and the Eurocentric bias and cartographic distortion that the Mercator map introduces onto visual representations of the world. In September 2026, the UN General Assembly [voted](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce30vp55dnlo) 164-1 to promote the use of equal-area projection, including the [Equal Earth projection](https://equal-earth.com/), when accurately representing the relative size of continents. The United States was the sole country to vote against the resolution. The resolution doesn’t ban the Mercator projection; it instead encourages governments, international organizations, and companies to use more geographically proportional maps and teach the limitations of different projections.

The United Nations vote signals a larger argument about power. A map projection cannot change the true physical size of Africa, but it can change how large Africa appears to the person looking at it. This distinction matters because power is not only exercised through armies, money, or political institutions. It is also exercised through visual representations that decide what is visible and what seems important. 

For centuries, European colonial power classified, renamed, mapped, and reorganized land and peoples that did not belong to them. Maps allowed them to transform unfamiliar territories into possessions that they could extract from and exploit. The map became a tool through which an empire was [upheld](https://nitep.educ.ubc.ca/january-08-2024-decolonizing-maps-addresses-the-biases-inaccuracies-and-colonial-perspectives-inherent-in-many-cartographic-representations/). Colonialism does not end entirely when a flag is lowered and a colony becomes independent. Political independence can coexist with inherited ideas about which places hold power and which countries have been dominated. The physical structure of an empire can disappear while some of its influence and hegemony remains. 

The UN’s campaign explicitly recognizes this dimension. Togo’s foreign minister Robert Dussey [argued](https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/09/1168284) that maps “guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions.” The UN has described the campaign as an attempt to confront the way geographic distortion can contribute to the symbolic minimization of Africa. 

For centuries, the world has been represented from the perspective of those who possessed the greatest political and economic power. Today, that skewed representation of the world is starting to be contested and replaced by a world view that more accurately projects the contributions of the nations and people that make up our planet. Maps matter because they remind us what the world is really like, shaping our perception before we even begin questioning it.