Chapter 1 provides the book’s theoretical bedrock and conceptual basis for a rereading of the techno-managerial policy world of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and an analysis of the African military politics that surround it. This is guided by a rethinking of space as relational, as well as the analysis of spatial semantics, observable structures of meaning-making in narratives that allow actors to shape social space. By way of the organigram as an artefact in the field of African peace and security, the chapter highlights the omnipresence of a representational understanding of space as well as its limits for grasping African military politics. Instead, a relational and processual ontology to understanding space is proposed, which allows us to conceptualize change and, consequentially, agency. Based on this reconceptualization of space, Döring draws on critical geopolitics as a tradition of thought that has allowed the observation of the shaping of space and highlighted the role of elites in doing so. These two conceptual moves are framed by an introduction to the spatiality of subsidiarity within APSA at the beginning of the chapter and by a discussion of the role of spatial semantics in African military politics at the end.

Chapter One contextualises the dynamic model of reading and mapping in terms of an evolving interdisciplinary relationship between literature, geography and cartography. It outlines the ways in which forms of literary mapping have emerged out of that connection before turning to critical cartography and its potential in relation to a more critical form of literary mapping. The final sections of the chapter use Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext to analyse the material nature of the juxtaposition of map and text. (82)

Chapters Three, Four, Five and Six focus on the emergence of explicit maps as an integral element within popular genres and thus follow a rough chronology from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Chapter Three explores the map in Adventure Fiction as it emerges in the late nineteenth century at a point when literary maps proliferate across texts and genres. This chapter offers a detailed reading of two iconic maps in Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines and seeks to show that visual and verbal meanings are fully integrated. In the final sections of the chapter, the concept of doubling in map and text is taken to its furthest extreme and works to create a new genre – the spy thriller. This is analysed with reference to John Buchan and full analysis of Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. (139)