De Facto recommends

While Tatevik Khachatrian was forced to leave everything behind one year ago, Vasila Mammadova was hopeful that, for the first time in 30 years, there was a chance she might get everything back.

As both sides of the island mark the war that began on 20 July 1974, it is in the knowledge that almost nothing has changed.

For over a century, Kurds have been trying to fight for their rights and freedom. Sadly, their quest has been largely characterized by human rights abuses and marginalization. Hindered by political persecution, their dream of independence has been gradually fading.

In the Sixties the British government expelled them from their island. Exiled to the UK, they’ve never given up hope of returning to their island. ‘As more and more of our elders are dying, it is important to preserve our culture.’

While the conflict over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh concluded with an Azerbaijani victory, resentments simmer on both sides, creating fertile ground for new violence.

It’s still not clear how many people were killed at Barrio Chino on 24 June 2022. As many as 77 people, most of them young men who had fled their homes in Sudan and South Sudan, are still missing. A reconstruction by Ben Ehrenreich.

Western Sahara’s former colonizer has shifted toward effectively recognizing Morocco’s illegal occupation of the territory.

Kiwi pilot Phillip Mehrtens was unlucky–he was in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was taken hostage by a rebel group in West Papua. The Detail takes a closer look at West Papua’s complicated independence struggle.

Half a century ago, the British government forcibly removed 2,000 people from a remote string of islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They’ve never stopped struggling to return.

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

“Who wouldn’t want to buy an island?” Marshall Mayer asks above the roar of the engine as the boat cuts through the still waters of the Caribbean Sea. Mayer is co-founder of Let’s Buy an Island, an ambitious project that in 2018 set out to crowdfund the purchase of an island. By December 2019, the group’s aspirations became reality, raising over $250,000 to complete the purchase of an uninhabited island off the coast of Belize.

Today in Europe there are 6.5 million people living in countries that, according to the rest of the world anyway, do not exist. These would-be republics’ borders, born out of the chaos of the fall of the Soviet Union, are unrecognized by the international family of nations, as is their legal right to dictate the shape of their futures.