Fugue States
Oberlin Alumni Magazine: What do you mean by the term invisible country?
international community, so they’re left off our mental framework of what the map of the world looks like.
Joshua Keating ’07 has vivid childhood memories of the Berlin Wall coming down and his fascination with the idea that two countries could become one overnight. Soon afterward, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, he saw how one country could become 15. Now a foreign policy analyst, staff writer, and editor at Slate, Keating is exploring why, in recent years, the map of the world has remained fairly static. During a fall visit to Oberlin, Keating met with Jeff Hagan ’86, the editor of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine, to talk about his book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood (Yale University Press) and the research behind it.
Joshua Keating: Actually, the original title of the book was What is a Country? We have these uncomplicated ideas of how you represent countries. They are places with a government and a flag and a military and defined borders. I wanted to look at the places that break the rules, places that resemble countries but aren’t recognized as such by the
OAM: Have there always been invisible countries? Or is this something new?
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JK: Well, it’s more that visible countries are new. There’s this one-size-fits-all idea of what a country is, that there’s one solid definition of it—that is what’s more recent than people realize. There’s
PA NG FEI CHI A NG ‘19
Thought Process