ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines horizontalism as a map for political practice. It has become part of the common sense of critical cartographic theory that the spatial story of a world of hierarchical states is effective in ‘blocking alternatives’, regardless of its functional instability and representational inadequacy (Shapiro, 1999, 60). The vertical map of the state entails a ‘moral cartography’, determining actors as relevant or irrelevant. In interpreting horizontalism as a theoretical map, the chapter explores the politics of decentralisation and networking that seek to counter the vertical map of the state. The chapter illustrates the ways in which mapping functions as normative theory, and how horizontalist cognitive maps function as a guiding episteme in contemporary social movements. Examining a range of movements, social, technological and organisational trends, the chapter argues that horizontalism is a map with ambiguous applications to politics, rather than an inherently emancipatory unmapping of the vertical cartography of the state.
