De Facto explores the realm of unrecognized states, fictional countries and curious border zones. On July 13 we organize a live evening with talks, art and music at De Roode Bioscoop in Amsterdam. Join us!

Canada and Denmark resolved a half-century-old border dispute, splitting the ownership of Hans Island, a 1.2-square kilometer mound of rock halfway between Nunavut and Greenland. The new border will divide the island roughly in half, following a natural ravine from north to south.

China has warned the US that any attempt to make Taiwan independent from China will trigger military action by Beijing’s forces. Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe met his US counterpart Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of an Asian security summit in Singapore.

Cyprus will lodge a complaint with the United Nations over Turkey’s new financial assistance deal with breakaway Turkish Cypriots that demonstrates Ankara’s “complete control” over them, the president of the ethnically divided island nation said Monday.

The small African state of Somaliland legally doesn’t exist. But Taiwan has spied an opportunity to make its mark.

After two years of Covid, De Facto could finally go live again. It was a great evening, with talks, art and music.

As the ripples of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pulse outward, they have left one region especially volatile: the South Caucasus. The Ukrainian conflict has paradoxically raised the likelihood of both further fighting and a negotiated peace in this area between the Caspian and Black Seas.

Indian security forces have killed six militants in Kashmir in the past 24 hours while militants shot dead a female TV performer and a police officer, officials said on Thursday, following the conviction of the region’s best-known separatist.

Our De Facto LIVE #3 in De Roode Bioscoop (Amsterdam) is sold out. We are looking forward to this evening with talks, art and music. No tickets? Don’t worry, the next event will be on July 13. The program will be announced soon. Stay tuned!

A wealthy American wanted to build an island republic. The king of Tonga had other ideas.

Photographer Mustafa Saeed sees the potential of all art forms as therapy in a post-war nation, moving towards collaborative efforts to make this happen in Somaliland.

Moldova raises concerns over suspected destabilisation campaign in Russia-backed breakaway region.

A look inside at how the artist Robert Alice and their team pulled off an exhibition of NFTs and crypto art in the wildest setting imaginable, while at the same time taking these stories out of the confines of the screen and into the world.

Artist Tamuna Ianvarashvili uses the dioramas as a form of peaceful protest against Russia’s occupation of Georgian regions and its brutality in invading Ukraine in February.

A small hotel in the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh unites several families who fled their homes during the recent war and provides a space to rekindle their hopes of finding a place to call home again.

Reporters of The New York Times traveled inside Transnistria, a Moscow-backed breakaway state in Moldova, to find out how Russia’s disinformation campaign stretches beyond its borders.

Shakhtar Donetsk was forced from its home city and then its country by Russian invasions. Its next stop? A series of exhibition games drawing attention to Ukraine’s plight.

How the Western Sahara conflict is fuelling new tensions between Morocco and Algeria.

In the audiovisual performance Europadorp/Europadorf, theater maker Silas Neumann takes us to the border area between Germany and the Netherlands. With video fragments, live soundscapes and augmented reality, he reconstructs the twenty year old utopia of a borderless village.

Scammers targeted people in developing countries.

On April 8 the Movies that Matter Festival kicks off in The Hague (NL) and online. The festival’s selection focuses on movies and documentaries related to human rights. We selected three of them for you.

The Kremlin has played down a suggestion by the president of South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia, that the unrecognized state could become part of Russia.

Soviet soldiers barged into Hirotoshi Kawata’s home on Sept. 4, 1945, searching for hidden Japanese soldiers and valuables. Kawata, then 11, remembers understanding only two words they said: tokei, or wristwatch; and sake, which they went on to loot from the home.

A young activist who documented the dire conditions in the Transnistrian army found herself in Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s invasion.

On September 24 last year, amid the latest flare-up in tensions between Serbia and its former province, Kosovo, a Kosovo Albanian businessman called Burim Piraj took to Facebook with a call to boycott goods made in Serbia.

The breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia will seek to join Russia, potentially leading to a new escalation in the Kremlin’s conflict with the West.

What makes a place your country? What makes a home? In Little Man, Time and the Troubadour, director Ineke Smits searches for answers in Abkhazia.

Unicode will no longer accept proposals for new flag emoji. “The Unicode Consortium isn’t in the business of determining what is a country and what isn’t,” writes Jennifer Daniel, chair of Unicode’s emoji subcommittee, in a March 28 blog post.

As climate change opens up the Arctic for transit and exploration, Russia has increasingly militarized the region. The U.S. is preparing a more aggressive presence of its own.

In Melitopol, temporarily occupied by Russian troops, military equipment of the unrecognized South Ossetia, whose forces joined the invaders, was recorded.