De Facto recommends

Architect of Catalonia’s illegal referendum of 2017 has signed deal to support Spain’s socialists in return for amnesty.

The third war over Nagorno-Karabakh, the long-disputed Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, ended almost as soon as it began. The next phase of the tragedy is now unfolding. How did Western inaction enable Azerbaijan and Russia? An analysis by Thomas de Waal.

The blockade of the Lachin corridor has now lasted eight months, trapping Nagorno-Karabakh with dwindling supplies of food and medicine. With the world concerned with conflicts in other places, Armenia appears irrelevant in the larger geopolitical calculations. Yet it remains oddly significant.

What happens to a people when their land disappears? Facing extinction, Tuvalu tries to create digital ‘twin’ to survive.

While Bougainville’s Panguna mine was abandoned decades ago, mining has not stopped in the area. Families have set up makeshift houses in the gaping pit, and men, women and children pass their days digging for whatever gold and copper they can reach.

Concerns over China’s expanding activities in the Polar regions seem to have grown with the recent reports of the construction of its new Antarctic station near the Ross Sea. The resumption of construction activities of China’s fifth research station—after a few years of delay—has generated quick responses from Western critics and think tanks.

Bougainville is likely to play a surprisingly significant role in the tussles between China and the US in the Pacific region. Lucas Knotter analyses the future of this breakaway island.

The Kremlin wants to return to the age when Russia dominated its neighbors across Eurasia. Instead, it’s driving them away.

In 2027, the world will see the first newly independent country since South Sudan in 2011. Bougainville, an autonomous province in Papua New Guinea (PNG), voted almost unanimously for independence in a 2019 referendum.

Waterloo Uncovered, the groundbreaking charity that combines archaeology with veteran care and recovery, will be visiting the Falkland Islands this month to begin the first intensive archaeological survey of its battlefields.

Maps have long played a crucial, symbolic role in the dispute over the Western Sahara. For years, because most world maps available elsewhere show the international border that separates Morocco from its coveted territory to the south, those that were sold in Morocco had to be separately manufactured for the domestic market, affecting everything from globes and atlases to toy puzzles and address books.

Jake Wright, Ramesh Ganohariti and Jennifer Dowling of Leiden University discuss the phenomenon of borders and their implications, using the case of post-Brexit Northern Ireland as a focal point.