De Facto recommends

A newly-published book explores the circumstances around the violence that accompanied Transnistria’s de facto secession from Moldova. Three decades later, finding new answers to old conundrums is key to preventing ongoing tensions from escalating.

A new book from Philippe Sands, The Last Colony, tells the story of the Chagossians, an island people who were expelled from their homes by the British and Americans.

The Indian authorities have charged the renowned novelist and Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy over public comments she made 13 years ago about the restive Kashmir region, the latest step in an intensifying crackdown on free speech by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

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.

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).

Extinguished Countries is the first guidebook series about countries that no longer exist. They don’t follow today’s borders but take us on a journey through time and space to lost kingdoms, republics and empires, looking for what unites us rather than divides us.