Sykes-Picot Agreement – how a border drawn in 1916 is still causing wars today

In June 2014, the Islamic State’s media wing released a short video titled The End of Sykes-Picot. It opens with a bulldozer gouging through a berm of earth at the Iraq-Syria border, the machine lurching forward as dirt cascades away in clouds. An ISIS fighter narrates in accented English, explaining what they are doing and why: they are erasing a line drawn in 1916 by two European diplomats, and the erasing of that line constitutes, in the video’s logic, an act of liberation. The production values are those of a recruitment advertisement. The argument is that of a history lecture.

Sit with that for a moment. A jihadist militia, at the peak of its military power, chose to frame its territorial expansion not in purely religious terms but in diplomatic-historical ones. It did not merely seize territory. It named the specific agreement it was undoing — a 108-year-old Anglo-French memorandum — and summoned that agreement as the symbolic enemy of its project. Whatever else the Islamic State was, it was not wrong about Sykes-Picot’s continued relevance. The agreement had enough residual charge, a century later, to serve as the identified oppressor of a self-declared caliphate.

The Agreement That Almost Wasn’t the Map

The Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed on 16 May 1916. Its formal name was the Asia Minor Agreement. Its negotiators were Sir Mark Sykes, a Conservative MP and seasoned traveller in Ottoman territory, and François Georges-Picot, a French diplomat and former consul-general in Beirut. What they produced was not a map of states. It was a partition of spheres: France would take direct control of coastal Syria and Lebanon, with indirect influence over the Syrian interior; Britain would take direct control of lower Mesopotamia and indirect influence over the Arabian Peninsula; Palestine would fall under some form of international administration. The document is available in full through the Yale Law School’s Avalon Project. It is worth reading. The borders it draws do not resemble a political map of the modern Middle East.

This is the first thing that needs to be said plainly, because most of what passes for public knowledge about Sykes-Picot is wrong in this specific way. The current borders of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel were not drawn by Sykes and Picot. They emerged from subsequent negotiations — the San Remo Conference of 1920, which allocated the League of Nations mandates; the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which settled the post-war Turkish question; and a series of Anglo-French boundary commissions that drew the lines in detail. Academic critics of the popular Sykes-Picot narrative — notably David Siddhartha Patel in a 2016 Brandeis Crown Center brief, and Steven Cook and Amr T. Leheta in Foreign Policy the same year — are right to point this out. The map that carved up the Middle East is not precisely the one those two men drew.

Mark Sykes himself is often presented as a man ignorant of what he was doing to whom. He was not. He had travelled extensively through Ottoman territories, published Through Five Turkish Provinces in 1900 and The Caliph’s Last Heritage in 1915, and possessed a political intelligence about the region that was real, if filtered through the assumptions of his class and time. Georges-Picot had served as consul-general in Beirut. Neither man was drawing blindly through an unmarked space.

Neither man was accountable to those who would live inside the resulting states — they were not designing countries they would have to govern, or that their children would inhabit, or that their diplomatic careers depended on making functional. They were dividing a collapsing empire between two colonial powers in the middle of a world war. The interests being balanced were French and British. Whether the resulting structures could be governed by consent — whether the populations inside those lines would experience the resulting states as legitimate — was not a variable in the calculation.

When the Bolsheviks published the text of the secret agreement in late 1917, the Arab world’s response was fury of a particular kind: the fury of a people who had been making a deal on one set of terms and discovered the other party had made a different deal on entirely different terms behind their back. That fury has not entirely dissipated. The agreement’s power as a symbol derives partly from this betrayal, and partly from something more structural: the principle it established survived the specific lines it drew. Every subsequent treaty that actually demarcated these borders inherited the same logic — that the region would be carved up according to great-power convenience, with no mechanism for local consent and no consideration of whether the resulting units could be made governable.

The treaty sequence

The popular account treats Sykes-Picot as the definitive partition of the Middle East. The actual sequence is more complicated. The Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) established the principle of Anglo-French partition and sketched zones of influence. The Balfour Declaration (1917) introduced the Palestine question. The Treaty of Sèvres (1920) attempted to impose a post-Ottoman settlement including Kurdish autonomy provisions — and was never ratified by Turkey. The San Remo Conference (1920) formally allocated League of Nations mandates: France received Syria and Lebanon; Britain received Iraq and Palestine. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923), negotiated after Turkish nationalist victory under Mustafa Kemal, superseded Sèvres entirely and settled Turkey's borders without any provision for Kurdish autonomy. The Anglo-French boundary commissions then drew specific lines. The resulting borders diverge from Sykes-Picot's original zoning in significant ways — but each subsequent document operated within the same framework of external partition, inherited without revision from the original agreement's premise.

The Kurd Who Was Promised a State

If you want to see the mechanism working at its clearest, look at the Kurds.

The Kurdish people — by most current estimates, between 30 and 45 million people, making them plausibly the largest stateless ethnic group in the world — are spread across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. They share a language (or a cluster of closely related dialects), a culture, and a territory that has a historical name: Kurdistan. They are not a people who failed to form a national identity. They formed one. What they did not form was a state, and the reason they did not is traceable, with unusual documentary precision, to a series of specific diplomatic decisions made between 1920 and 1923.

The Treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920, gave the Kurds a promise. Articles 62 through 64 of that treaty provided for Kurdish autonomy in predominantly Kurdish territories of the former Ottoman Empire, with Article 64 specifying that if the Kurds demonstrated, within one year, that a majority of the population in those areas desired independence, Turkey would be required to renounce its claims over them. For the first and only time in international treaty history, “Kurdistan” appeared as a geographical and political concept in a major multilateral treaty. The Allied powers had formally committed to it — on paper, in a signed document, with specific articles and a timeline.

Three years later, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed. The word “Kurd” does not appear in it. Articles 62 through 64 of Sèvres — the autonomy provisions, the independence pathway — were dropped without replacement. The reversal was driven by a specific political calculation: Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist movement had demonstrated it could resist Allied military pressure and win, which made Turkish cooperation strategically valuable; Britain, eyeing the oil fields of Mosul, wanted a settlement with Ankara more than it wanted to honour the Kurdish commitment; France had its own interests in a stable Turkey as counterweight to British influence. The Kurds had no equivalent leverage. They had been promised a state as a by-product of Ottoman partition; when the calculus shifted, the promise evaporated with the same indifference with which it had been made.

The result was Kurdish territory distributed across four separate states — Turkey, the French Syrian mandate, the British Iraqi mandate, and Iran — each of which subsequently pursued policies of suppression, assimilation, or denial of Kurdish political identity to varying degrees of brutality. What followed is not one conflict but a set of parallel ones, all produced by the same structural condition: a population large enough and coherent enough to constitute a nation, divided across multiple states whose political systems were built around excluding that nationality from power.

In Turkey, the PKK — the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, founded in 1978 and designated a terrorist organisation by both the United States and the European Union — has waged an insurgency since 1984 that has killed, by most estimates, between 40,000 and 45,000 people over four decades. The PKK’s founding ideology was Marxist separatism; its leader Abdullah Öcalan later developed a theory of “democratic confederalism” that nominally abandons the goal of a separate state in favour of autonomous governance within existing borders. This evolution is worth noting not as evidence of pragmatism but as evidence of foreclosure: when the state-based solution has been structurally denied for long enough, even the demand for it shifts.

In Iraq, the denial took its most extreme form in 1988. Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign — conducted between February and September of that year — was a systematic military operation against Iraqi Kurdish populations, using conventional forces, chemical weapons, and mass displacement. The campaign’s most infamous single incident was the chemical attack on Halabja in March 1988, which killed an estimated 3,200 to 5,000 people in hours, making it the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in history. The Anfal campaign’s total death toll is disputed; Human Rights Watch’s 1993 investigation estimated no fewer than 50,000 deaths, with the figure potentially reaching 100,000 or higher. What is not disputed is that it was genocidal in design and execution — a state attempting to resolve, by mass killing, a demographic problem its own borders had created.

In September 2017, the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq held an independence referendum. The result was 92.73 percent in favour of independence. The Iraqi central government nullified the result. Iran and Turkey — both with Kurdish minorities of their own — supported Baghdad. The United States, which had spent years building a military alliance with Kurdish forces in the fight against ISIS, offered no support for the referendum outcome. The result: the KRG lost control of Kirkuk and approximately 40 percent of the territory it had administered. The 92.73 percent disappeared without consequence.

The Kurdish case is the mechanism made visible. This is not a story of a people who lacked the cohesion or the will to form a state. It is a story of a people whose state was promised in one treaty and revoked in the next, partitioned across four borders by powers who had no stake in the outcome, and then suppressed, gassed, and overruled whenever the structural injustice threatened to produce a remedy. The documentary chain from 1920 to 2017 is unbroken.

Öcalan's confederalism

Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK's imprisoned founding leader, developed his theory of "democratic confederalism" while serving a life sentence on İmralı Island. Drawing on American anarchist Murray Bookchin's concept of "libertarian municipalism," Öcalan argued that the nation-state was itself the problem — that Kurdish liberation required not a Kurdish state but a democratic, multi-ethnic, feminist governance model operating across existing borders. The theory is intellectually serious and politically significant. It is also, notably, a response to permanent foreclosure: when the state-based solution has been made unavailable for long enough, the intellectual project redirects toward imagining liberation without it. Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish administration in northern Syria established during the Syrian civil war, attempted to implement elements of this model — and was subsequently squeezed between Turkish military pressure and US strategic calculations. The theory is a map of what happens when people run out of conventional options.

The State That Was Assembled to Fail

Kurdistan shows what happens when colonial cartography cuts across a coherent national group, denying it the state its population and territory would otherwise warrant. Iraq shows the other side of the same operation: what happens when you weld incompatible groups together into a single state and then wonder why it will not cohere.

Modern Iraq was created from three formerly distinct Ottoman vilayets. The vilayet of Mosul, in the north, was predominantly Kurdish and Turkmen. The vilayet of Baghdad, in the centre, was predominantly Sunni Arab. The vilayet of Basra, in the south, was predominantly Shia Arab. These three units had been administered separately under the Ottomans, and for reasons rooted in religion, ethnicity, and history, they had limited experience of political integration. The British fused them into a single administrative entity because doing so was strategically convenient: Mosul for its oil, Basra for its Persian Gulf access, Baghdad as the administrative centre. There was no Iraqi national identity to appeal to, because Iraq had not previously existed as a unified political unit.

The demographic arithmetic the British created was structurally precarious from the first day. Iraq’s Muslim population is roughly three-fifths Shia and one-third Sunni; Kurds constitute between fifteen and twenty percent of the total. Into this arrangement the British installed a Sunni Arab monarchy — Faisal I — drawn from the Hashemite family of the Hejaz, a man who had no prior connection to Iraq and whose religious community constituted perhaps a fifth of the country’s population. The choice was deliberate. The British found the Sunni Arab administrative class more legible, more cooperative, and more familiar than the Shia clergy who dominated the south. Faisal was a figure they could work with. The Shia majority, whose political marginalisation was built into the state’s founding structure, did not factor heavily in the calculation.

The confessional arithmetic was not incidental to what followed. Every Iraqi government from the Hashemite monarchy through the 1958 republican coup and the Ba’athist takeover of 1968 to Saddam Hussein’s presidency was Sunni-dominated, governing over a Shia majority and a Kurdish minority that had both been structurally excluded from the levers of state power. Holding this arrangement together required force — not as an aberration from normal governance but as its basic instrument. The Iraqi state was not an authoritarian anomaly. It was a state whose structural composition made consent-based governance nearly impossible, and which therefore converged on coercion as the default mode — not as deviation from the mandate’s design but as its predictable expression.

When the 2003 US invasion removed that coercive architecture, what emerged was not chaos from which order might crystallise, but the immediate assertion of forces that had been compressed for decades. The sectarian civil war of 2006 to 2008 — in which UN figures for 2006 alone documented more than 34,000 civilian deaths, with the total for the full period likely exceeding 150,000 — was not caused by the invasion. The invasion revealed a fault line that had existed since 1920. Shia militias, Sunni insurgencies, and Kurdish autonomy movements were all, at their structural root, expressions of communities reacting to a state whose founding design had excluded them from power. The specific political form that exclusion took — Ba’athism, Saddamism — had been removed; the structural condition that made exclusion necessary to the state’s cohesion had not.

The Islamic State’s capture of Mosul in June 2014, and its rapid consolidation of control across the Sunni Arab heartland of western Iraq, followed the same logic. ISIS recruited heavily from the networks of the dissolved Iraqi army — a Sunni Arab institution whose dissolution in 2003 had transferred its membership from state authority to unemployment in a single administrative order. A Sunni population that had held state power for eight decades found itself governed, after 2003, by a Shia-dominated Baghdad that many experienced not as post-authoritarian democracy but as confessional revenge. Into that political space ISIS moved with an offer: a Sunni state, for Sunnis, in territory that Sunnis had historically administered. It was a catastrophic offer. It was also a structurally legible one.

The Mosul question

The inclusion of the vilayet of Mosul within the British mandate — rather than in Turkey, in a separate Kurdish state, or under French influence — was not an accident of geography. Mosul was contested: Turkey claimed it; the Kurds lived in it; France had designs on it. Britain resolved the contest in its own favour at the San Remo Conference and confirmed it through the 1926 League of Nations ruling, primarily because British oil interests had identified the Mosul region's reserves as strategically significant. The Iraq Petroleum Company, formed in 1929, included British, French, Dutch, and American interests in proportions that reflected the geopolitical settlement rather than any local preference. The border that enclosed Mosul within Iraq was, among other things, an oil-field boundary. This does not make it a conspiracy. It makes it a transparent record of whose interests were being served when the lines were drawn.

Lebanon, or: What Happens When You Make Sectarianism Constitutional

Kurdistan is the case of partition; Iraq is the case of forced assembly. Lebanon is the case where the mechanism operated differently — not through the denial of a state to a coherent people, or through the welding of incompatibles under a single sovereignty, but through the formalisation of sectarian division into the constitutional architecture of the state itself. The result is a political system permanently designed to reproduce the divisions it inherited, incapable of transcending them because its entire structure depends on their maintenance.

Greater Lebanon was created by France in August 1920 through the enlargement of the old Ottoman province of Mount Lebanon — predominantly Maronite Christian — to absorb Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, Tripoli, and the Bekaa Valley, populations that were predominantly Muslim and that, in many cases, preferred union with Syria. France acted at Maronite request and against the explicit opposition of Muslim communities. The expansion created a state whose demographic balance was contested from the moment of its creation.

The governing arrangement that emerged from this was the National Pact of 1943 — an unwritten pre-independence agreement between Christian and Muslim political leaders that allocated the state’s senior positions by religious confession: the president would be Maronite Christian, the prime minister Sunni Muslim, the speaker of parliament Shia Muslim. Parliamentary seats would be divided in a six-to-five Christian-to-Muslim ratio. This arithmetic was derived from a single source: the 1932 census conducted under the French mandate. That census, which showed Christians as a slight majority of approximately 51 percent of the population, is the only census Lebanon has ever conducted. It has never been updated. In 2026, Lebanon’s confessional system rests on a demographic snapshot that is ninety-four years old.

The reason there has been no second census is not bureaucratic neglect. It is political calculation, carried out by every political actor in Lebanon simultaneously. Every major religious community knows, with reasonable confidence, that a new census would show a Muslim majority — probably a substantial one — that would justify a redistribution of political power. No Christian political bloc wants that redistribution. No Muslim bloc wants the instability of the transition process required to achieve it. The census that would reveal the truth sits unordered in a governmental to-do list that no one intends to action. The political system built on the 1932 numbers has generated precisely the incentives required to keep the 1932 numbers in place.

The Lebanese Civil War, which ran from 1975 to 1990 and killed an estimated 120,000 to 150,000 people, was not caused solely by the confessional system’s demographic miscalibration. Palestinian armed presence in Lebanon, Syrian and Israeli intervention, and the regional reshaping of Shia political identity under Iranian influence all contributed. But the confessional system’s structural incapacity — its inability to accommodate demographic change or to provide legitimate political expression to communities whose power allocations were based on a census from 1932 — was the condition that the war’s multiple pressures exposed and exploited. A political system with a functional mechanism for redistributing power in response to demographic change would not have been invulnerable to civil conflict, but it would have had a release valve. Lebanon had none.

The Taif Agreement of 1989, which ended the civil war, modified the confessional ratios — equalising Christian and Muslim parliamentary seats — but did not abolish the system. The president is still required to be Maronite. The prime minister must be Sunni. The speaker of parliament must be Shia. These requirements are still in force in 2026. The constitutional text that encodes them was written under a French mandate whose strategic interest was in Maronite political dominance, in a country whose demographic composition has changed beyond recognition since that interest was inscribed.

The August 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut — 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in unsafe conditions for six years, killing at least 218 people and displacing more than 300,000 — was a bureaucratic failure that cannot be attributed to any single political actor. That is precisely the point. The ammonium nitrate had been flagged by port officials, customs authorities, and government ministers. Nothing was done because the confessional system had distributed accountability across so many competing institutional fiefdoms that no single actor had sufficient authority to impose a safety decision on a facility that sat, nominally, within everyone’s jurisdiction and therefore, practically, within no one’s. The explosion did not happen despite the confessional system. It happened because of it.

Hezbollah and the Shia gap

The Lebanese confessional system allocated the speakership of parliament to the Shia community — but the speakership is a largely ceremonial position, and the Shia were historically the poorest and least politically organised of Lebanon's major communities. When the post-1979 Iranian revolutionary project sought a Lebanese partner, it found a community that had been systematically under-resourced by the very political system theoretically designed to represent it. Hezbollah emerged in the 1980s not only as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon but as a social services provider — schools, hospitals, welfare networks — filling the vacuum the Lebanese state had created by allocating political positions to Shia representation while failing to allocate the resources that might have made that representation meaningful. Hezbollah is a product of the confessional system's structural failures as much as it is a product of Iranian strategic interest. The two explanations are not in competition.

The Revisionist Objection, and Why It Doesn’t Save Us

A serious objection runs against the entire argument. It deserves an answer rather than evasion.

The revisionist case — made most carefully by Patel, Cook, Leheta, and Ali Murat Kurşun in his 2019 All Azimuth analysis — runs roughly as follows: first, the specific borders of the modern Middle East do not closely match what Sykes and Picot drew, so attributing those borders to the agreement is historically imprecise; second, the Middle East’s conflicts are primarily a function of authoritarian governance and legitimacy crises, not of borders per se, and the cartographic explanation displaces political accountability from rulers onto maps; third, assigning contemporary conflicts to a 1916 agreement is deterministic in a way that erases a century of regional agency — Arab states, Kurdish movements, and Iraqi political actors have had choices, and those choices have mattered.

All three points have force.

The first concession the article makes freely, because it has already made it: the specific Sykes-Picot lines were superseded. The argument here is not about those particular lines but about the principle they instantiated — that the region would be partitioned by outside powers without mechanism for local consent, and that every subsequent treaty operated within that principle’s framework.

The second concession is partial. Authoritarian governance is plainly the proximate cause of the region’s most acute suffering — Saddam Hussein’s decision to gas the Kurds, the Assad dynasty’s decision to bomb its own cities, the Lebanese political class’s decision to store ammonium nitrate next to residential areas. These were choices. They were made by specific people who bear specific responsibility. But the structural argument is not that cartography determines outcomes independently of human agency. It is that state structures assembled without consent-based foundations tend, under pressure, toward authoritarian solutions — because coercion is what holds together what consent cannot. The Sunni-minority governance of Iraq was not an aberration from the mandate’s design; it was a predictable response to a state that could not be held by democratic means. Authoritarianism in this region has not been, on the whole, despite the structural conditions — it has been because of them.

The third concession is partial but requires the sharpest resistance. The Kurdish case is an illustration of exactly what regional agency looks like when it is deployed against a structural cage. Kurdish political actors have had a century of agency. That century has produced: the Sheikh Said rebellion in Turkey (1925), the Simko Shikak revolt in Iran (1926), the Dersim massacre in Turkey (1938), the Mahabad Republic in Iran (1946, lasting eleven months), four major PKK-Turkish military campaigns, the Anfal genocide, the 2005 Iraqi constitution’s Kurdish autonomy provisions, and the 2017 independence referendum. Ninety-two percent of a people voted for independence, and the vote was nullified within weeks. The structure has proven more durable than the agency deployed against it — not because the Kurds lacked agency, but because the cage within which they exercised it was built to resist them.

What the revisionist critique ultimately establishes is that the article’s argument must be about a class of action, not a specific agreement. Colonial cartographic imposition — borders drawn by outside powers for administrative convenience, without accountability for governability or consent — creates structural conditions from which specific, predictable failure modes reliably emerge. Sykes-Picot is the name of an instance of that class. The Middle East is the most legible example. But it is not the only one.

Not Just the Middle East — The Pattern

The clearest non-Middle Eastern demonstration of the mechanism is Kashmir, and it is worth understanding precisely why.

In March 1846, the British East India Company concluded the Treaty of Amritsar with Gulab Singh, a Dogra Hindu ruler of Jammu. Under the treaty, the British sold — sold, for 7.5 million Nanakshahee rupees — the Kashmir Valley and surrounding territories, a region with a majority Muslim population, to a Hindu ruler whose religion differed from that of most of his new subjects. The assembly of what became the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir brought together the Kashmir Valley, predominantly Muslim; Jammu, predominantly Hindu; Ladakh, predominantly Buddhist; and Gilgit, predominantly Muslim — a composite entity designed for administrative convenience and boundary clarity, not for the consent of the governed or the coherence of the governed’s political identity.

The mechanism here differs slightly from Iraq or Lebanon in its form: this was a colonial sale to a local ruler rather than direct mandate administration. But the structural result was identical in character. A boundary was drawn for financial and administrative reasons across populations with divergent religious identities, with no consent mechanism and no consideration of whether the resulting unit could sustain legitimate governance. When the British departed in 1947 and the partition of India was negotiated, the Hindu maharajah of a majority-Muslim state opted — after initial hesitation and Pakistani irregular forces entering his territory — to accede to India. The resulting ambiguity has produced three wars between India and Pakistan (1947, 1965, 1999), a Line of Control that bisects the former princely state, and a dispute that sits, in 2026, between two nuclear-armed states whose weapons targeting lists include each other’s cities. The Treaty of Amritsar was signed 180 years ago. Its consequences are measured in nuclear warheads.

The other major instance of the pattern is less precisely traceable but broader in scale. The Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 formalised the European partition of Africa with no African representation at the table — a process that drew borders through more than 200 ethnic groups, split kingdoms and trading networks, and forced historical rivals into single administrative units. The Belgian colony carved from the Congo basin enclosed that diversity within a single colonial framework; independence in 1960 was followed almost immediately by the Katanga secession crisis. The Second Congo War of 1998 to 2003 — which drew in nine African nations, reflected ethnic and political fault lines traceable to the colonial carve-up, and produced a death toll that methodological disputes place somewhere between approximately 900,000 and 5.4 million — stands as the deadliest conflict on earth since the Second World War. The methodological range itself is instructive: it reflects the difficulty of counting deaths in a conflict that operates across vast ungoverned territory, affecting populations who die not only directly from violence but from disease and displacement caused by it. The uncertainty about the number does not create uncertainty about the scale of the catastrophe.

The comparison between these cases and the Middle East does not hold at every point. Not every post-colonial border produced sustained violent conflict. Rwanda and Burundi, whose colonial boundaries enclosed Hutu and Tutsi populations in ways Belgian policy deliberately exacerbated, nevertheless collapsed into violence through post-independence political choices that the borders alone did not predetermine. Singapore was separated from Malaysia in 1965 under conditions of communal tension and became one of the world’s most stable and prosperous states. The colonial cartographic act is not a guarantee of failure. It is a significant structural risk factor that forecloses certain options for consent-based governance and leaves a state dependent on the quality and honesty of the political institutions built within it.

The pattern’s value is not to claim determinism but to establish frequency. When states are assembled by outside powers for administrative convenience, without consent mechanism and without accountability for governability, the resulting structural conditions tend to produce specific failure modes — suppression of excluded groups, coercion as governance substitute, conflicts that recur because their structural roots persist. The Middle East makes this pattern legible because the documentation is unusually complete: there are names, a date, a map, and a specific betrayal of a specific promise. Kashmir has a specific date, a specific transaction, a specific sale price. The Congo has a specific conference and a specific absence — no African voice in the room. What connects them is not a conspiracy but a method.

The African states' choice

At its first Conference of African Heads of State and Government in Cairo in 1964, the Organisation of African Unity passed Resolution AHG/Res. 16(I), endorsing the principle of uti possidetis juris — the obligation to respect inherited colonial boundaries as the basis for post-independence sovereignty. The resolution was a deliberate choice by African states to keep borders they knew were arbitrary, because the alternative — redrawing them along ethnic lines — was judged more dangerous. The choice was not irrational. Yugoslavia's post-1991 experience of ethnically motivated border revision produced multiple wars and hundreds of thousands of deaths. The OAU's resolution reflects a hard-won understanding that the problem is not solely the borders but the absence of political institutions capable of managing heterogeneity within them. The borders are the inheritance; the institutions are the question.

Why It Doesn’t End

The ISIS video opens with a bulldozer demolishing a berm. The berm took three years to rebuild. The border is still there.

This is not a trivial observation. It is the mechanism’s final lesson: the colonial cartographic act does not merely produce conflict. It produces a structural trap in which every available remedy also causes harm, and in which the incentives generated by the original imposition reliably work to maintain it. The ISIS caliphate correctly named what had been done to the Sunni populations of western Iraq and eastern Syria — they had been structurally excluded from power in states assembled without their consent. It then attempted to remedy this by establishing a Sunni state, which required seizing the territory of Kurds, Shia, Yazidis, and Christians who were also already living there. The original cartographic crime had produced a situation where every plausible correction was also a dispossession. Every group with a legitimate grievance about the borders also occupied the territory that any revision would take from someone else.

This is the deepest reason why colonial cartographic impositions are so durable. They do not merely create injustice. They create a structure in which the injustice cannot be corrected without committing new injustices, because the communities displaced and divided by the original borders have spent a century building lives, states, and identities within those borders’ terms. Redrawing them is not a return to a pre-colonial clean slate. The slate has been written on. The ink is dry.

Lebanon demonstrates what this looks like in its most formally embedded form. The confessional system cannot be reformed through democratic means, because any politician seeking to abolish it must first win power under it — and winning power under it requires defending it. Every politician who might want reform must first win power under a system built to resist it; the coalition required to dismantle the system can only be assembled by actors who depend on the system for their power. It is a structural trap: a system that generates precisely the incentives required to maintain itself. The system produces the politicians who maintain the system who produce the next generation of politicians who maintain it. It is not spectacular. It does not make propaganda videos. It is simply, perfectly self-sealing.

The international legal architecture has converged on the same conclusion through different reasoning. The UN Charter’s provisions on territorial integrity and the OAU’s uti possidetis resolution exist because the alternative — allowing borders to be revised in response to legitimate grievances — produces at least as much violence as maintaining unjust ones. The post-Yugoslav redrawing of Balkan borders was accomplished at a cost of approximately 140,000 lives and produced a set of states that are still, in 2026, unresolved in their mutual relationships. The logic of international border stability is not that existing borders are just. It is that revision is more dangerous than stasis.

What this produces is a world in which the structural pathologies of colonial cartography are effectively permanent — not because the original injustice is accepted as just, but because no mechanism for reversing it without committing new injustices has yet been devised. The states that have achieved something resembling stability within these borders have done so not by resolving the original structural problem but by building governance institutions capable of managing it: power-sharing arrangements, federal structures, minority rights frameworks, economic incentives for cross-communal cooperation. That is a different ambition from the one that attended the original cartographic acts. It is humbler and harder and more honest about what is actually possible within inherited structural conditions.

It is also, notably, the ambition that the diplomats of 1916 never had — because they never bore any accountability for whether the structures they designed could be made to work.

Coda

Return to the 1932 census.

It sits in the Lebanese national archive, a document produced under French mandate authority, showing a narrow Christian majority in a country that no longer has one by any reasonable demographic estimate. Every Lebanese government since independence has known this. No Lebanese government has ordered a new census. The document is not a secret. Its obsolescence is not concealed. It is simply, by universal political consent, not updated — because updating it would require dismantling the system built on it, and no one inside that system has an interest in its dismantling.

There is nothing dramatic about a census. There is no bulldozer, no berm of earth cascading in the Syrian sun, no propaganda video narrated in English for global consumption. The ISIS video announced its violence loudly because violence requires announcement. The 1932 census requires no announcement. It persists because the political system designed around it has generated every incentive needed to keep it in place, and will continue to generate those incentives until something external breaks the loop — which may be a long time coming, since the external forces most likely to break it would themselves be acting on interests of their own.

Both the video and the census are expressions of the same structural trap: one explosive and theatrical, the other glacial and bureaucratic. The caliphate named the crime and then committed a new one. The census names nothing, admits nothing, and changes nothing. Of the two, the census is the more honest representation of how colonial cartography actually persists — not as dramatic rupture but as the quiet, self-maintaining stasis of a system that has made peace with its own injustice, because the alternative is worse, and because no one who could change it is accountable to those who cannot.

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Principales sources et références

Cook, Steven A., and Amr T. Leheta. “Don’t Blame Sykes-Picot for the Middle East’s Mess.” Foreign Policy, 13 May 2016.

Human Rights Watch. Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993.

International Rescue Committee. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An Ongoing Crisis. New York: IRC, 2007.

Kurşun, Ali Murat. “Deconstructing the Sykes-Picot Myth: Frontiers, Boundaries, Borders and the Evolution of Ottoman Territoriality.” All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace 9, no. 1 (2020): 83–104. Published online 2019.

Kurdistan Regional Government — United States. “Halabja: The Chemical Attack That Shook the World.” us.gov.krd.

Miller, James. “Why Islamic State Militants Care So Much About Sykes-Picot.” Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, 16 May 2016. rferl.org.

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