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Southern Sudan

By Martin W. Lewis | December 23, 2009 |

In its December 19, 2009 issue, The Economist magazine reported a rare bit of “good news” from Sudan: the country’s ruling party and the former rebels of the south had agreed upon provisions for the scheduled 2011 referendum that will supposedly allow the south to secede. According to the agreement, Southern Sudan will indeed

Geo-Trivia: Enclaves, counter-enclaves, and (the world’s only) counter-counter-enclave

By Martin W. Lewis | December 22, 2009 |
Sovereign states (or countries) generally appear on the map as solid, contiguous blocks of territory, and they are certainly conceptualized as such. But exceptions abound. Many countries, for example, have separates “annexes” located at some distance, technically known as exclaves (think of Alaska). Bits of territory within the boundaries of one state that

Telangana: A New State in India?

By Martin W. Lewis | December 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

Not long after gaining independence, India remapped its internal political geography so that its main divisions would roughly correspond with linguistic groups. With each major language community being granted its own state, local demands for autonomy would, theoretically, be much reduced. Although this policy has generally resulted in stable “statoids”(see http://www.statoids.com/), agitation for the creation