Connectography: mapping the global network revolution. By Parag Khanna

Connectography: mapping the global network revolution. By Parag Khanna. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2016. 466pp. £16.60. isbn 971 1 47460 423 9. Available as e-book. Parag Khanna begins Connectography by telling readers of the lifelong obsession with maps that underpinned his interest in international politics. In this new book, Khanna seeks to become a cartographer himself; and it is a surprisingly uncharted world that he seeks to map: the world of global infrastructures. For Khanna, the old political maps he loved when he was young have begun to fade; their charting of territorial borders is increasingly problematic when trying to understand the contemporary landscape of global politics. The old maps offer nothing but ‘cartographic illusions’ of a settled and permanent international system, and hide from view the dynamic processes and transnational material infrastructures connecting the world in new and unexpected ways. Khanna shows that the advent of new computational tools provides the techniques to represent patterns of material development in dynamic ways that reflect the pulsating rhythms of demography, economics, ecology and engineering that are transforming the international system.