Journal
Reports, analyses and features from all 195 countries - the journalism behind the journeys.
The Council Nobody Stood For
Belgium's German-speaking Community has about 78,000 people, nine communes and a parliament whose decrees carry the same force as a Flemish one. In 2019 it handed a permanent share of its agenda to twenty-four citizens chosen by lot, which no legislature anywhere had done before.
Ten Million Hand Pumps
From the 1970s, aid agencies and the Bangladeshi government moved a country off pond water and onto hand-pumped tubewells, and deaths from waterborne disease fell steeply. Then, in 1993, the water turned out to contain arsenic — not from any spill, but from the sediment the delta is made of.
Where the Second Sea Went
Bahrain means the two seas, and the second one was fresh — artesian springs along the northern strip and vents of sweet water rising through the seabed offshore. They stopped inside a single lifetime, and what replaced them is a line of desalination plants returning hot brine to one of the saltiest and slowest-flushing seas on earth.
Adopted Without a Vote
A campaign begun in 2019 by law students on a campus in Port Vila ended six years later with the International Court of Justice ruling unanimously on what states owe one another over climate change. Vanuatu — fewer than 350,000 people, and reliably near the top of every list of the world's most disaster-exposed countries — is the government that put the question there.
The Lake That Runs Both Ways
Lake Ichkeul fills with fresh water down six wadis in winter and drains backwards from the sea in summer, and everything that grows or feeds in it depends on that swing. Three dams built between 1983 and 1994 removed the winter half, and getting it back cost Tunisia a sluice gate, a decade on the World Heritage danger list and a standing annual claim on water the country does not have.
The Land Came Back, the Village Did Not
In 1969 the Makuleke were moved at gunpoint off the triangle between the Luvuvhu and the Limpopo so that it could be added to the Kruger National Park. They won it back in 1998, and then held meetings and decided not to move home.
Thirty Per Cent of an Ocean
Seychelles has 455 square kilometres of land and an exclusive economic zone of about 1.4 million. In 2016 it restructured US$21.6 million of sovereign debt owed to Paris Club creditors on the condition that it protect thirty per cent of that ocean, and in March 2020 it finished the job — ten years ahead of the deadline the rest of the world would later set itself.
The Day That Did Not Happen
On the night of 29 December 2011 Samoa crossed the international date line and deleted Friday the thirtieth from its calendar. It was the second time the country had changed which half of the Pacific it kept time with, and it came two years after it changed which side of the road it drives on.
Taught in Four Hundred Languages
Papua New Guinea has around 840 living languages, more than a tenth of every language alive on earth, in a population of about ten million. In 1995 the state decided to teach its six-year-olds in them, by the early 2000s more than four hundred languages were in use in its classrooms, and in 2013 it stopped.
The River with a Human Face
In March 2017 New Zealand passed a law declaring the Whanganui River a legal person, with all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of one. It ended the longest-running case in the country's legal history, and the argument since has moved from whether a river can hold rights to what those rights are actually able to stop.
A Central Bank That Cannot Print
Montenegro pays for everything in euros and has never been in the euro area, the European Union or any monetary agreement with Brussels. It adopted the Deutsche Mark in November 1999 as an act of separation from Belgrade, inherited the euro when the Mark was withdrawn, and has run a state ever since without the power to issue a banknote.
The Stand-In Tortoises
Mauritius lost its giant tortoises around 1800, and with them the only animal on the island large enough to swallow an ebony fruit and carry the seed anywhere at all. In 2000 a Mauritian conservation charity did the thing nature reserves exist to prevent — released a foreign species inside one, on purpose — and the experiment has since become a recognised category of restoration.
A Three-Year Lease on a Forest
In 1996 Madagascar passed a law that lets a village take over the management of the forest on its doorstep — for three years first, then ten more if the state decides it has gone well. Something over a thousand of those contracts have been signed since, almost all of them out of sight, and the one everybody drives past sits thirteen kilometres south of Ambalavao.
The Land That Cannot Be Sold
Around 87 per cent of Fiji is customary land that cannot be sold to anyone by anyone, ever — a rule written by the colony's first substantive governor in the 1870s and carried unbroken into the 2013 constitution. It is why indentured labourers were shipped from India, why the sugar belt emptied after 1997, and why every resort you can book is standing on a lease.
The Terraces Were a Wage
Drought in Cabo Verde has never stopped, and famine has — the last one ended in 1948, and there has not been another since. What changed was not the rainfall but a labour scheme that paid rural people, in wages funded by selling donated food, to rebuild the hillsides they were standing on.
The Box Marked Others
To stand for the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina you must declare yourself a Bosniak, a Croat or a Serb, and live in the right half of the country. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that unlawful in December 2009, and the constitution — an annex to a peace treaty, drafted in English, never voted on by any Bosnian parliament — has not been amended since.
Built on the Defence Power
The Snowy Mountains Scheme was legislated in 1949 under the Commonwealth's defence power, because Canberra had no clear authority to build it, and was declared finished in 1974 on time and within budget. Its successor, Snowy 2.0, was announced in 2017 at a third of what it now costs and is being tunnelled through a national park.
The Schemes Were the Banking System
By the end of 1996 Albanian pyramid schemes held liabilities the IMF later put at around $1.2 billion — close to half of national output — and something like two-thirds of the population had money in them. When they stopped paying in January 1997 the state went down with them, and the country has spent thirty years explaining why anyone fell for it.
The Line to Apollo
Cahora Bassa dams the Zambezi in Tete province, and for the first thirty-two years of Mozambican independence it was 82 per cent owned by the Portuguese state. Mozambique bought the controlling share in 2007 for US$950 million, and what it had bought was a wall pointed the wrong way.
An Open Question, By Order
The archaeology of Great Zimbabwe was settled in 1906 and settled again, unanswerably, in 1929. What followed was not a scholarly dispute but a state policy requiring the country's own museums to describe the builders as unknown.
The Other Site Was Kafue
In 1955 the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland chose to dam the Zambezi at Kariba rather than the Kafue, a river that runs entirely inside Northern Rhodesia, and the first machine hall went on the southern bank. Zambia has spent the seventy years since building its way out of that decision, and a drought in 2024 showed how much of the job was left.
The Tower That Changed Its Name
For the six years it was under construction, the tallest building in the world was called Burj Dubai. It opened on 4 January 2010 as the Burj Khalifa, three weeks after Abu Dhabi wired Dubai ten billion dollars.
Eight Permits a Day
Uganda sells eight gorilla permits per habituated group per day and not one more, which caps the entire country's supply at something on the order of two hundred people a morning. Rwanda answered the same constraint in 2017 by doubling its price to 1,500 dollars; Uganda decided not to follow, and the two neighbours have been running opposite experiments on the same animal ever since.
Sixty-Seven Millimetres
Two railways terminate in Dar es Salaam a few kilometres apart and cannot exchange a single wagon, because their rails are sixty-seven millimetres out. That gap is the clearest surviving evidence of what the TAZARA line was built to do, which was never primarily to serve Tanzania.
The Hills Went Into the Sea
Singapore has grown by roughly a quarter since independence, first by cutting down its own hills and tipping them into the sea, then by buying sand from its neighbours until Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia each stopped selling. What it builds now — a Dutch-style polder, a caisson wall at Tuas, an 800-hectare sea defence off the east coast — is shaped by that refusal and by a rising sea.
Four Metres Wide
On 3 October 2003 a channel four metres across was cut through the sand spit that holds the Senegal river off the Atlantic, to stop Saint-Louis flooding. It worked that week, and within twenty years the channel was six kilometres wide and had rewritten the tides, the salt and the map of who lives where.
Ten Per Cent of the Gate
In May 2017 Rwanda doubled the price of an hour with a gorilla family from 750 dollars to 1,500, in a park of 160 square kilometres that can sell fewer than a hundred permits a day. The number was a policy rather than a market outcome — high value, low volume — and a tenth of it is written back into the villages on the park boundary.
Sixteen Years on the Danger List
Bahla Fort was the first Omani site UNESCO listed, in 1987, and it went onto the List of World Heritage in Danger the following year, where it stayed until 2004. The problem was not neglect. It was the repair — a generation of restoration work done in cement on a building made of unbaked mud.
The Steam Under the Rift
Kenya's electricity used to arrive when it rained, and in a bad year it did not arrive at all. It now comes mostly out of the ground: geothermal supplied 39.5 per cent of everything the country generated in the year to June 2025, more than hydro, wind and everything burned put together.
Four Hundred Dollars a Tonne
Cocoa in Ghana has no market price — a state board announces one figure each October and every farmer in the country is paid it. In 2019 Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire used that monopoly to impose a $400-a-tonne premium on the entire world market, and then spent years watching buyers try to subtract it again somewhere else in the price.
The Carrying Capacity of a Cave
The Mogao Caves outside Dunhuang hold 492 painted chambers cut over a thousand years, and the thing that damages them fastest now is visitors breathing. Since 2014 the site has run to a measured daily limit, with a film standing in for the caves you are not shown and sensors deciding which doors get unlocked.
Stopped at the Kgotla
In the 1980s Botswana's water department proposed dredging the Okavango's outflow river and regulating the delta's floods. The scheme was stopped at a public meeting in Maun on 11 January 1991, and it has never been formally cancelled — only suspended.
The Outflow Is Set by Law
Soviet planners treated Lake Sevan as an inefficiency — water evaporating off a shallow surface instead of turning turbines — and took roughly nineteen metres off it. Armenia has spent the sixty years since digging tunnels to put the water back, and now fixes the lake's annual outflow by an act of parliament.
One Island, One Resort
For thirty-seven years a visitor to the Maldives could not legally sleep on an island where Maldivians lived: the state leased whole uninhabited islands to single operators and kept tourism physically separate from the country it was happening in. A regulation issued in 2009 permitted guesthouses on inhabited islands, and the two systems have been running side by side, on very different terms, ever since.
The Half They Chose to Save
In August 2005 Kazakhstan finished an earth dam across the strait that once joined the two halves of the Aral Sea, and the northern half began to come back within months. It works because it keeps everything the Syr Darya delivers on one side of it, which is also the reason the southern half is not coming back at all.
Selling Summer, Buying Winter
Bhutan sells electricity to India all summer and buys it back all winter, because nearly every plant it has built runs on the river rather than on a reservoir and the rivers fall when the snowmelt stops. The largest of those plants was begun in 2008, was due in 2016, and is still not generating, because the hillside it is anchored to keeps moving.
The Last Compulsory Harvest
For most of its independent history Uzbekistan brought in the cotton harvest with conscripted labour — teachers, nurses and students sent to the fields on a quota handed down from the presidency. In March 2022 the international boycott that had targeted it for well over a decade was called off, because the price mechanism that made the conscription necessary had been dismantled.
Eight Per Cent
A few hundred walkers trespassed on Kinder Scout in 1932 and five went to prison, though not for trespassing. Seventy-three years later England opened about eight per cent of itself to walkers, while Scotland, in the same decade, opened almost all of it.
Three Kilometres East
Kiruna is being demolished and rebuilt three kilometres east of itself, because the iron ore the town exists to mine leans in underneath the streets and the mine is following it down. The company doing the digging is owned by the state and is paying for the move, which is the only reason anybody agreed to it.
The Year the Fertiliser Stopped
On 27 April 2021 Sri Lanka banned the import of chemical fertiliser with immediate effect and announced that it would become the world's first fully organic farming nation. Seven months later the policy was in retreat, the main rice harvest had failed, and a country that had fed itself was buying rice.
Fifty Hairpins and a Wooden Chapel
The most driven road in Slovenia was cut over a 1,611-metre pass in 1915 by Russian prisoners of war, to move Austro-Hungarian shells to the Soča front faster. A hundred of them died under an avalanche, and the survivors built a chapel that is now a fixed point in Slovenian foreign policy.
Outside the Walls, in Wood, Within a Year
In 1681 the Hungarian diet at Sopron told Protestants where they could build, what they could build with, and how long they had. The buildings that came out of those restrictions are the largest timber structures anyone in the region had attempted, and five of them are still standing in Slovakia.
What the Iron Gates Cost
A dam agreed in 1963 made the most dangerous stretch of the Danube navigable and produced about 2,100 megawatts, and it drowned an inhabited Turkish island to do it. The engineers cut a Roman inscription out of the cliff and raised it above the new water line; they did not save the island.
The Veto in the Forest
Białowieża is the last stretch of lowland forest in Europe that has never been cleared, and only about a sixth of the Polish side of it is national park. The argument over the rest has run through a bark beetle, a European court and a border wall, and it keeps coming back to a clause in Polish law that hands the decision to six local councils.
The Road That Floats
In 2003 the Philippines stopped treating the sea as the place its road network ended, and rebuilt the national highway out of ferry ramps. It was the cheapest transport infrastructure an archipelago of 7,641 islands could put up, and cheapness turned out to be the achievement and the risk in the same object.
The Dyke That Moved Backwards
For a thousand years the Dutch answer to a river was a higher wall. Between 2007 and 2019 the state spent about €2.3 billion moving dykes backwards, demolishing the houses behind them and handing whole polders to the water instead.
The Grass Nobody Owns
Mongolia handed its collectivised livestock to herding households between 1991 and 1993 and left the pasture in state ownership, where the constitution still keeps it. The national herd has climbed from about twenty-six million animals to more than seventy, and every few years a winter kills them by the million — ten million in 2010 alone, close to a fifth of everything alive.
The Second Signature
Malaysia signed a contract for a 688-kilometre railway across the peninsula in 2016, suspended it in 2018, and signed a cheaper version of the same project in 2019. The published difference between those numbers is the clearest public account anyone has of what a piece of Belt and Road infrastructure is actually worth.