Journal
Reports, analyses and features from all 195 countries - the journalism behind the journeys.
The Third River
In December 1992 Iraq opened a concrete-lined canal running some 565 kilometres (351 miles) from below Baghdad to the Gulf and called it the Third River. Within a decade satellite imagery showed roughly nine tenths of the Mesopotamian marshes gone — and then, in April 2003, the people who had lived in them went out with diggers and broke the embankments themselves.
The Mother Well
Iran watered its desert cities for something like two and a half thousand years with qanats — tunnels driven for miles into an alluvial fan to bring groundwater out by gravity — and the water inside them was privately owned, measured in units of time and traded like land. Two laws, in 1968 and 1982, made all of it public property, and the electric pump that replaced the tunnel is now draining an aquifer the tunnel was physically incapable of over-drawing.
The Gates Open at Low Tide
Georgetown stands below the Atlantic that lies a few hundred metres from its main street, and has done since the Dutch drained this coast in the eighteenth century. The city's canals, its street grid and the word Guyanese still use for a sluice gate are all consequences of that, and so is the flood that cost the country most of a year's economic output in 2005.
What a Kilo of Cashew Buys
More than nine tenths of everything Guinea-Bissau sells abroad is a nut almost nobody in the country eats, and a large share of it is not sold for money at all — it is swapped for imported rice at a rate the government announces each spring. The rice used to be grown here, in fields hacked out of the mangrove by hand.
The Line That Had to Carry More Than Ore
On 11 November 2025 the first iron ore left the Simandou range in south-eastern Guinea and crossed the country to the Atlantic on a railway that had not existed five years earlier. The interesting part is not the ore. It is the conditions Guinea attached to the track.
A Cartel of Two
In 1987 Grenada sat down with Indonesia and the two of them agreed to set the world price of nutmeg between them. It held for about three years, and the only reason a country of a hundred thousand people could attempt it at all was a piece of 1940s legislation that had turned every grower on the island into a single seller.
No Injury Required
On 11 November 2019 The Gambia — 11,300 square kilometres, fewer than three million people, less than three years out of a dictatorship — filed a genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice. No Gambian had been harmed, and that was precisely the argument: under the Genocide Convention, nobody has to have been.
The Year the Logs Stopped Leaving
On 1 January 2010 Gabon made it illegal to export a log. The country that supplies most of the world's okoumé stopped selling it in the form the world wanted to buy it, and then had to build somewhere to put it.
The Grade Was All You Got
For nine years, Ethiopian coffee could not legally reach a foreign buyer carrying the name of the washing station that made it. The exchange that took the name off was built to stop farmers being cheated, and it worked — which is why undoing it took a second law rather than an apology.
The Horn in the Strongroom
Over four years at the end of the 1980s Eswatini lost the great majority of its rhino, and the law it passed in response is among the strictest in Africa. The horn it has accumulated since sits in a strongroom it is not permitted to sell, and twice this century it has asked the world to change that.
A Decree, a Road and a Daily Count
Since 1997 somebody has walked the bushmeat stalls in Malabo market every day and written down what is lying on them. The record is now long enough to show what a presidential decree did to the trade in monkeys, and what a road did to it afterwards.
The Ban and the Gas Bottle
In 1967 the Dominican Republic banned commercial logging outright, closed the sawmills and handed enforcement to the armed forces. The forest has come back since — but the decision that did most of the work was a subsidy on bottled cooking gas, and a subsidy has to be paid for every month for ever.
The Acres Nobody Can Buy
On the east coast of Dominica there are 3,700 acres that cannot be sold, mortgaged or inherited as private property, because they are held in common by the Kalinago and have been since 1903. It is the reason the coast has not been developed and the reason a family there cannot borrow against the ground under their house, and both halves are the same rule.
The Rent on a Strait
Djibouti has no oil, no ore and almost no rain, and about a million people live in it. What it sells instead is a position on the Bab el-Mandeb — to Ethiopia by the container, and to four foreign militaries by the year.
The Bridge and the Port
Kinshasa and Brazzaville face each other across about four kilometres of the Congo — the closest pair of capital cities anywhere except Rome and the Vatican — and there is no bridge between them. The reason has never been the river.
What the Oxen Were For
When Soviet trade collapsed in 1991 Cuba lost most of its fuel, nearly all of its fertiliser and about a third of its economy, and the food system that replaced it was written up abroad as the world's largest experiment in organic farming. It was not an experiment and nobody chose it.
The Cut at Vridi
For fifty years Côte d'Ivoire had five hundred kilometres of coast and no harbour on any of it — freight went ashore through the surf. In July 1950 a channel was finally cut through the sandbar at Vridi, and how large the country's largest city became, which of its old towns emptied and which of its beaches are now disappearing all follow from that one decision.
The Nationality That Opened No Doors
In 2008 the Comoros passed a law allowing it to sell citizenship, and Gulf states bought it in bulk for stateless residents they did not want to naturalise themselves. On 21 November 2022 a former Comorian president was sentenced to life imprisonment for what happened to the money.
The Park That Followed Its Elephants
Zakouma held more than 4,000 elephants in 2002 and about 450 by 2010, which is roughly ninety per cent gone in eight years. The herd is now back to something near 800, and the decision that turned it around was not a fence or a patrol but the admission that the animals do not stay inside the park.
The Arithmetic at Dzanga Bai
From 1990 a study at one forest clearing in the south-west of the Central African Republic did something nobody had managed for forest elephants: it watched the same individually known animals for long enough to work out how fast they breed. The answer — a first calf at around twenty-three, then one more every five or six years — is why a poached population needs the better part of a century to come back.
The Kingdom That Wrote Itself Down
Between 1896 and about 1910 the ruler of a kingdom in western Cameroon designed six successive writing systems for his own language, narrowing a pictographic set of five or six hundred signs down to a syllabary of around eighty. Then he opened schools to teach it, cast metal type to print it, and had his territory surveyed and mapped with every place name written in it.
A Licence to Beat a Drum
In October 2017 Burundi issued a decree setting out who may beat a drum, on whose authorisation and at what kind of event. Very few countries have written a musical instrument into administrative law, and the reasons here are less strange than they first sound.
The Metro Curitiba Never Built
Curitiba has been about to build a metro for most of half a century and has never built one. What it built instead, beginning with two bus lanes in 1974, is the system that something over 180 cities have since copied — usually without the zoning law that was holding it up.
The Tenth of January
Benin's revolutionary government spent the 1970s treating Vodun as obscurantism to be cleared out of the way, and could not do it. In 1996 the state that replaced it made 10 January a paid national holiday for the same religion, and in 2024 the tourism agency turned the date into a ticketed two-day festival with a concert stage on the beach at Ouidah.
Fifty-Five Cents on the Dollar
In November 2021 Belize retired its entire stock of commercial foreign debt — US$553 million, close to a third of national output — by buying it back at fifty-five cents on the dollar. The money came from a loan whose contract turns marine conservation into debt service: miss the payments into the conservation fund and it counts as a default.
A Fence Through the Herd
The European bison was extinct in the wild by 1927, and every animal alive today descends from twelve survivors in zoos. Poland built a steel wall through the forest they were put back into in the first six months of 2022, and the herd on the Belarusian side is now a separate population whether anyone intended that or not.
The Clause in the Bond
In 2018 Barbados owed close to 160 per cent of its economic output and had a few weeks of foreign reserves left. What it did next put a clause into its sovereign bonds allowing the country to stop paying its creditors when a disaster arrives — and that clause is now written into World Bank lending.
Twenty-Eight Years to Close It
In 1958 the Bahamas drew a boundary round thirty-five kilometres of empty cays and called it the first land-and-sea park anywhere in the world. It took another twenty-eight years to do the thing that made it work, which was to forbid taking anything out of it at all.
The Flame That Runs on a Gas Main
Azerbaijan calls itself Odlar Yurdu, the Land of Fire, and the temple that gave the phrase its best-known image stopped burning in 1969. The gas that had fed it for centuries had been drawn out from underneath by the industry the country was built on.
One Fat Sheep a Year
Barbuda was too dry and too thin-soiled to be worth planting, so nobody ever divided it into estates, and after emancipation its people simply carried on using the whole island in common. An act of parliament wrote that arrangement into law in 2007; three months after Hurricane Irma emptied the island, another act took it back out.
Ninety-Nine Years, Then Thirty
Portugal granted the concession to build the Benguela railway on 28 November 1902 and wrote it to run for ninety-nine years. It expired to the day, into a country where the line had been cut for a quarter of a century — and the terms Angola wrote for the second concession, in 2022, are pointedly not the terms it inherited.
The Country That Taxed Itself
Until 2013 Andorra had no general sales tax, and until 2015 no personal income tax at all — the state ran on duties charged on the goods filling the shops. In a decade it built a tax system, opened its banks to automatic information exchange and joined the IMF, and it did none of it voluntarily.
The First Cargo Went to Canvey Island
In October 1964 a ship loaded liquefied gas at Arzew on the Algerian coast and sailed for the Thames estuary — the first commercial cargo of LNG ever traded between two countries, shipped by a state that had been independent for twenty-seven months. Almost everything Algeria has argued about since runs back to that voyage, including the reason its Roman cities are empty.
The Park the Villages Ran
Afghanistan gazetted its first national park in April 2009, around six lakes in the central highlands held back by dams the water builds itself, and what made it function was not a boundary but a committee drawn from the fourteen villages inside it. In August 2023 the ministry for the propagation of virtue barred women from entering, removing about half the people the arrangement had been built to serve.
Eight Buildings and a Reservoir
In 2020 the reservoir behind the Ilısu Dam closed over Hasankeyf, a town on the Tigris that had been protected under Turkish law since 1978. Eight of its monuments were cut free, driven two kilometres uphill on wheeled platforms and set down in a mown field; the rest of it is under the water.
One Year and a Notice Period
In March 2021 Saudi Arabia let private-sector migrant workers change employer without their employer's permission, which was the central thing the sponsorship system had always prevented. The reform did not cover domestic workers, and domestic work is a larger share of employment in Saudi Arabia than anywhere else on earth.
The Certificate You No Longer Need
On 30 August 2020 Qatar removed the requirement that a migrant worker obtain a signed no-objection certificate from their employer before taking a different job, and became the first state in the Gulf to do it. The paperwork went; the residence permit is still issued in the employer's name.
The Passport With a Price List
For a decade Malta sold citizenship of the European Union at a published price, and the residence requirement had a price of its own. On 29 April 2025 the Court of Justice ruled that it had never been Malta's to sell that way.
A Hundred Kilometres of Maintenance
The Curonian Spit is a sandbar ninety-eight kilometres long that had already swallowed fourteen villages before anyone worked out how to hold it still. What holds it is a piece of nineteenth-century engineering shaped like a landscape, and it only holds because people keep rebuilding it.
The Dam That Was Not Built
Latvia dammed its main river three times and drowned the landscape its folk songs are made of, and the one time the public objected out loud, in 1958, it lost. When a fourth dam was proposed in the mid-1980s the objection worked — and the campaign that stopped it became the movement that took the country out of the Soviet Union.
The Market in the Car Park
For about eighteen months Kuwait ran a second, unofficial stock market out of an air-conditioned car park in Jibla, where shares were bought with cheques post-dated up to a year ahead and nobody checked whether the money behind them existed. When it stopped in August 1982 the paper handed in came to roughly 94 billion dollars, and every commercial bank in the country but one was insolvent.
The Carrier That Runs Backwards
Israel’s Water Law of 1959 made every drop of rain that falls on the country public property, and the pipeline built to move it ran one way — from the Sea of Galilee down to the Negev. Sixty years on, most of the country’s drinking water starts in the Mediterranean instead, and the carrier has begun running in the other direction.
The Layers Were Read in the Wrong Order
A metre-tall hominin came out of a cave in western Flores in 2003, and for a decade the most startling thing about it was the date — eighteen thousand years, recent enough to overlap with people like us. In 2016 the same team dug the same trench again and found that the sediment had been read in the wrong order.
The Gardens Keep Their Own Hour
India runs one time zone across nearly thirty degrees of longitude, so the sun is up over Arunachal Pradesh while Gujarat is still nearly two hours from dawn. Assam's tea estates have quietly kept their own clock, one hour ahead, since the British planted them — and the proposal to make that official was rejected on strategic grounds.
The Aquifer Is Not a River
Every oasis in Egypt's Western Desert runs on the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, the largest body of fossil groundwater known, most of which fell as rain before anyone farmed anything and which is not being replaced. Egypt has spent seventy years building farms on it, and at the other end of the same desert Siwa is being slowly ruined by water it cannot get rid of.
A Majority of Goats
In April 2021 the European Commission registered halloumi as a protected designation of origin, which turned a recipe into a legal document with a milk ratio written into it. Cyprus now exports more of the cheese than its sheep and goats can supply.
The Rate Was Already Fixed
Bulgaria became the twenty-first member of the euro area on 1 January 2026, converting at 1.95583 lev to the euro — the same number the currency had been pinned to since 1999. The exchange rate did not move, because a banking collapse in the winter of 1996 had already taken away the country's power to move it.
Renewed Every Two Years
Brunei has been under a state of emergency since 12 December 1962, proclaimed four days after an armed rising and renewed on a two-year cycle ever since. It is not a curfew or a crackdown — it is the country's ordinary legislative procedure, and it is why the laws here are called Orders.