De Facto recommends

What is the true size of Africa? The ‘Correct The Map’ campaign revives the debate about the distorted Mercator projection and calls the world to adopt the Equal Earth projection, which reflects countries’ sizes more accurately.

Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, a small rock in northern Africa conquered by Spain in 1564, holds the title for the world’s smallest national border, measuring just 85 meters in length.

The Guardian Archive has recently catalogued a series of cartoons by former Guardian political cartoonist Les Gibbard. The cartoons come from a period during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and relate to The Falklands war.

The 120-seat eatery will serve a growing Chinese civilian population on Woody Island.

Daughters of the Sun, a documentary by Reber Dosky, premiers this week at the Movies that Matter Festival in The Hague. A tender and inspiring film about a group of Yezidi women and girls who were abducted as sex slaves by Islamic State and now have to rebuild their lives. With each other’s love and support, they find the strength to look forward again.

Italian photographers Lavinia Parlamenti and Manfredi Pantanella are working on An Atlas of countries that ‘don’t exist’ which will cover ten unrecognized states. Their aim is to make a photo book with the five places they covered so far: Transnistria, Catalonia, Nagorno Karabakh, Northern Cyprus and Western Sahara.

By some estimations, Australia hosts around a third of the world’s self-declared micronations. There are three good reasons why

A Country of Seven Billion Outhabitants, the long read by De Facto’s co-founder Jorie Horsthuis about EuroStaete, was selected for the editorial project The Writings on the Wall, a collaboration of Volume and Beta, the Timisoara Architecture Biennial 2022.

Statehood and sovereignty continue to be contested in a variety of ways throughout the world, resulting in protracted violent and latent conflicts in pursuit of self-determination, secession, and international recognition. At a conference in Innsbruck (August 22-26), scholars will interact about these themes in conceptual debates across various research traditions.

Thirteen years after he bought it, Uri Geller, a master of the grand gesture, has decided to elevate Lamb’s status from a private Scottish island to that of a country, with a flag, constitution and anthem. Settlement on the island itself is not allowed, its only inhabitants being puffins, guillemots and an assortment of other seabirds - and until recently a solitary rat.

In Blood and Honey: Encounters at the Borders of the Balkans, Dutch journalist Irene van der Linde and documentary photographer Nicole Segers set out to document the borders of the Balkans. Go and watch their work at Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen (the Netherlands).

What does it mean to be a citizen of Abkhazia, South Ossetia or any other de facto state? Are the people living in such territories stateless? What are some of the precarious situations they are faced with? An interview with Ramesh Ganohariti, a PhD student from Dublin City University.