Tag: terra nullius

  • Bir Tawil and the Hala’ib Triangle: The Territory Nobody Wants and the Territory Everybody Wants

    In 1899, the British drew a border between Egypt and Sudan along the 22nd parallel — a straight line, the kind empires like, cutting across desert without regard for who lived where. In 1902, the British drew a second border — an administrative line, adjusted to reflect the grazing territories of local tribes — that deviated from the 22nd parallel in two places. One deviation created the Hala’ib Triangle: 20,580 square kilometers of Red Sea coastline with a port, fishing grounds, manganese deposits, and a population of 10,000-30,000 people. The other deviation created Bir Tawil: 2,060 square kilometers of featureless Saharan desert with no permanent population, no infrastructure, no resources of consequence, and summer temperatures exceeding 50°C. The 1899 line places Hala’ib in Egypt and Bir Tawil in Sudan. The 1902 line places Hala’ib in Sudan and Bir Tawil in Egypt. Each country claims the line that gives it Hala’ib. Each country’s claim places Bir Tawil in the other country’s territory. Neither country claims Bir Tawil, because claiming it would mean accepting the border that surrenders the Hala’ib Triangle. The result is that Bir Tawil — roughly the size of Luxembourg — is the last significant non-Antarctic terra nullius on Earth: land that belongs to nobody, not because nobody wants land, but because the cost of claiming this particular land is losing a much better piece of land 250 kilometers to the east.

    The Hala’ib Triangle, meanwhile, has been controlled by Egypt since 1995. Egyptian police, Egyptian administrators, Egyptian-built roads and schools and clinics. Sudan protests. Egypt ignores the protest. The de facto resolution is that Egypt has both pieces — it controls Hala’ib by force and Bir Tawil by default, because nobody else is there — while the de jure resolution is that the border remains undefined, the disputed territory remains disputed, and Bir Tawil remains the cartographic residue of two empires, two borders, and two countries that would rather leave a Luxembourg-sized hole in the map than concede the coastline.

    The mechanism

    The Bir Tawil paradox is the cleanest illustration of a principle the Off The Map course has been documenting across multiple case studies: borders are not descriptions of geography — they are assertions of interest, and when two assertions conflict, the territory that falls outside both assertions ceases to exist in the international system.

    The Croatia-Serbia Danube dispute created terra nullius by accident — the river moved, the map didn’t, and neither country’s interpretation of the border covered the pockets in between. Bir Tawil is terra nullius by design — not in the sense that anyone planned to create unclaimed territory, but in the sense that both countries have made a deliberate strategic calculation to not claim it, because the claim that includes Bir Tawil excludes Hala’ib. The Croatian-Serbian terra nullius is a cartographic error. The Egyptian-Sudanese terra nullius is a cartographic strategy.

    The Ilemi Triangle is the structural cousin: five colonial lines drawn through East African territory, three claimant countries, zero agreed boundary. But the Ilemi Triangle is claimed — Kenya administers it, South Sudan disputes it, Ethiopia has treaty-based positions. Bir Tawil is unclaimed. The difference matters legally: a disputed territory has competing sovereigns who can, in theory, negotiate. Terra nullius has no sovereign. There is no one to negotiate with, because there is no one to negotiate for.

    The people who are actually there

    Bir Tawil has no permanent population in the sense that census-takers mean — no fixed settlements, no addresses, no utility connections. It does have people. The Ababda and Bishari tribes — nomadic pastoralist communities whose grazing territories predate both the 1899 and 1902 borders — cross through Bir Tawil seasonally, as they have for centuries, following water sources and pasture with no regard for whether the territory they’re traversing belongs to Egypt, Sudan, or nobody. The Ababda in particular consider the territory theirs in a way that has nothing to do with the sovereignty framework that created the dispute.

    In recent years, artisanal gold mining has drawn small numbers of prospectors into Bir Tawil and the surrounding border region. The mining is unregulated — there is no regulatory authority because there is no sovereign — and the environmental consequences are what you’d expect from mercury amalgamation processing in a desert with no oversight: mercury pollution in soil and groundwater, in an area where the nomadic population depends on wells for drinking water. The rare earth and conflict minerals courses document supply chains where extraction in ungoverned territory produces environmental and human costs that nobody is responsible for cleaning up. Bir Tawil’s artisanal gold mining is the smallest-scale version: extraction without governance, profit without accountability, contamination without jurisdiction.

    The North Sentinel Island post documented a population that has never consented to the sovereignty of the state that claims it. The Ababda and Bishari of Bir Tawil inhabit territory that no state claims at all — they are, in the eyes of the international legal system, people living nowhere, crossing borders that don’t exist, grazing livestock on territory that belongs to nobody, and drinking water contaminated by mining that no regulatory authority oversees because no regulatory authority has jurisdiction.

    The kingdom of a six-year-old

    Bir Tawil’s terra nullius status has produced, predictably, a parade of self-declared monarchs. The most widely covered was Jeremiah Heaton, a Virginia farmer who traveled to Bir Tawil in June 2014, planted a flag, and declared the “Kingdom of North Sudan” — not for geopolitical reasons but because his seven-year-old daughter Emily had asked him if she could be a real princess. Disney optioned the story for a film. The Washington Post ran it as a human-interest piece. The internet briefly debated whether a Virginia farmer could, in fact, become a king by planting a flag in unclaimed desert.

    He could not. Heaton’s “kingdom” was never recognized by any country, any international organization, or the Ababda tribe whose grazing territory he’d planted the flag on. But the story illustrates the conceptual gap that terra nullius creates: in a world where virtually every square meter of habitable land is claimed by at least one state, unclaimed territory becomes an invitation — to dreamers, libertarians, micronationalists, and fathers with daughters who want to be princesses. The micronations post documented entities that declare statehood without capacity. Bir Tawil’s claimants go a step further: they declare statehood on territory that no state has claimed, in the apparent belief that the absence of a competing claim constitutes an opportunity rather than a warning.

    In January 2025, the “Principality of Bir Tawil” — a separate project from Heaton’s kingdom — applied for observer status at the United Nations. The application has not been acted on. Multiple additional claimants maintain websites, issue “passports,” and sell “citizenship” or “noble titles” to online buyers. None have established permanent presence on the territory, because the territory is 2,060 square kilometers of Saharan desert with no water infrastructure, no road, no electricity, no building of any kind, and summer temperatures that will kill you if you don’t have your own supply chain. Declaring sovereignty is easy. Surviving sovereignty is the part that requires a state.

    Hala’ib: the prize that explains the void

    The reason Bir Tawil exists as terra nullius is Hala’ib. Understanding Bir Tawil without understanding Hala’ib is like understanding the Fergana Valley’s enclaves without understanding the water conflict that makes them lethal — the void only makes sense in the context of the thing both parties are actually fighting over.

    Hala’ib is ten times the size of Bir Tawil, with Red Sea coastline, a deepwater port at Halayeb town, fishing rights, manganese deposits, and potential offshore oil and gas resources. Egypt has administered the triangle since 1995, following a Sudanese-backed assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa that year. Egypt deployed military forces, established administrative control, and has since built infrastructure — roads, schools, clinics — that treats Hala’ib as Egyptian territory. Sudan has protested to the UN on multiple occasions. The protests have produced no action. Egypt’s control is de facto and unchallenged on the ground. The situation mirrors Western Sahara — an occupying power that has physically controlled the territory long enough that the occupation has become the status quo, while the legal claimant protests without effect.

    Sudan’s current civil war — which erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, displacing over 10 million people and producing what the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis — has effectively eliminated any Sudanese capacity to press the Hala’ib claim. A government that cannot control Khartoum is not in a position to contest Egyptian administration of a Red Sea triangle. The Azawad and Myanmar posts documented states disintegrating into competing armed factions. Sudan in 2026 is the same process at an even larger scale — and every moment of Sudan’s disintegration is a moment in which Egypt’s control of Hala’ib becomes more permanent, and Bir Tawil’s terra nullius status becomes more irreversible.

    Why they’re in the course

    Bir Tawil and Hala’ib are the Off The Map case study in the geometry of competing claims — where two borders, two countries, and one coastline produce a territory that everybody wants and a territory that nobody wants, and the territory that nobody wants exists only because claiming it would mean losing the territory that everybody wants. Transnistria exists because a patron sustains it. Artsakh ceased to exist because a patron failed to protect it. Diego Garcia’s population was removed because the territory was too valuable. Bir Tawil’s population is ignored because the territory is too worthless — and the worthlessness is precisely what makes it terra nullius, because neither country will accept the cost of claiming it.

    The Ilemi Triangle has five lines and three claimants. The Croatia-Serbia Danube has two interpretations and zero claimants for the pockets in between. Bir Tawil has two lines and zero claimants for the desert in between — and a parade of self-declared kings who mistake the absence of a claim for the presence of an opportunity. The map has a hole in it. The hole is the shape of a country that nobody’s border can afford to include. And inside the hole, the Ababda keep grazing, the miners keep mining, and the kings keep planting flags — in a territory that is, legally, nowhere, and will remain nowhere as long as Hala’ib is worth more than the hole.

    This is the kind of place our Off The Map course was built to map — where two borders drawn by the same empire in three years created a piece of Saharan desert the size of Luxembourg that neither Egypt nor Sudan will claim because claiming it means losing the Red Sea coastline both of them want, a Virginia farmer once declared himself king of it so his daughter could be a princess, a “principality” applied for UN observer status in 2025, nomadic herders cross it without knowing or caring whose territory it isn’t, artisanal gold miners contaminate its groundwater with mercury under the jurisdiction of no one, and the entire paradox exists because the British couldn’t decide where to put the line — so they put it in two places, and the gap between them has been nobody’s problem, and nobody’s country, for 127 years.

  • The Croatia-Serbia Danube Dispute: The Border a River Moved and Nobody Can Agree On

    Rivers make terrible borders, and the Danube proves it. Along a 140-kilometer stretch between Croatia and Serbia, the international boundary between two sovereign states — one of which is an EU and NATO member, the other a candidate for both — depends on whether you believe the border is where the river flows now or where it flowed in the 19th century. Croatia says the border follows the cadastral municipality boundaries established before hydraulic engineering and natural meandering altered the Danube’s course — lines that trace the old riverbed, not the current one. Serbia says the border follows the thalweg — the center of the river’s current navigable channel — which is the standard rule for river borders under international law. The two lines disagree at multiple points along the 140-kilometer section, creating pockets of territory on each bank that one country claims and the other controls. The total disputed area is up to 140 square kilometers — roughly 90% of it on the eastern bank, controlled by Serbia but claimed by Croatia. The remaining 10% sits on the western bank — pockets of land that, by a quirk of the competing claims, neither country claims at all. The territory that Serbia says belongs to Croatia, Croatia says belongs to Serbia. Nobody owns it. In 2015, a Czech libertarian politician named Vít Jedlička planted a flag on the largest of these unclaimed pockets — a 7-square-kilometer piece of forested Danube floodplain called Gornja Siga — and declared it the Free Republic of Liberland. He has been arrested by Croatian police for trespassing on land that Croatia’s own maps show as outside Croatian territory. The micronations post covered entities that exist by declaration. Liberland exists in a legal void that two sovereign states accidentally created by disagreeing about where a river used to flow.

    How the dispute was made

    The Danube has been a border in this region for centuries — the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier ran along it after the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718. But the Danube of the 18th century and the Danube of the 21st century do not occupy the same channel. Rivers meander. Channels shift. Nineteenth-century hydraulic engineering — straightening bends, cutting through meanders, reinforcing banks — moved the river further still. The cadastral maps that Croatia relies on were drawn before these changes. The maps show the river where it was. The river is somewhere else. The territory between the old channel and the new channel is the disputed zone.

    The dispute first surfaced in 1945 when the Đilas Commission — established by Tito’s government to define the borders between Yugoslavia’s constituent republics — attempted to draw the line between Croatia and Serbia along the Danube. The commission’s report was ambiguous enough that both sides claim it supports their position. Croatia says the commission adopted the cadastral boundaries. Serbia says the commission identified the river itself as the border. Federal authorities in 1947 advised that Vojvodina’s interpretation — that the border follows the river’s midpoint — was erroneous, and that the disputed islands (Vukovarska ada, Šarengradska ada, Hagel island) belonged to Croatia’s Vukovar district. But the ruling was never formalized. Within the Yugoslav federation, it didn’t matter — the border was internal, citizens moved freely, and nobody was going to war over river islands.

    Then Yugoslavia dissolved, and in 1991, the Badinter Commission ruled that the internal borders between Yugoslav republics became inviolable international borders. The ruling did not specify where those borders actually were. The ambiguity that was tolerable inside a federation became an international dispute overnight — the same mechanism that created the Fergana Valley’s six enclaves when Soviet internal borders became international frontiers, and the same mechanism that made the Ilemi Triangle’s five colonial lines into a three-country dispute when the empires withdrew. Internal boundaries become international problems the moment the entity that contained them ceases to exist.

    The terra nullius problem

    The most unusual feature of the Croatia-Serbia dispute is not the territory that both countries claim — that’s standard border-dispute fare. It’s the territory that neither country claims. Because Croatia insists the border follows the old cadastral line (east of the current river), and Serbia insists the border follows the current river (the thalweg), there exist pockets on the western bank where the cadastral line places them in Serbia but the thalweg places them in Croatia. Serbia doesn’t claim them because Serbia’s position puts them in Croatia. Croatia doesn’t claim them because Croatia’s position puts them in Serbia. The pockets are, under both countries’ interpretations simultaneously, the other country’s territory. Neither exercises sovereignty. Neither patrols them. Neither taxes, governs, or services them.

    Under international law, territory that no state claims or exercises sovereignty over is classified as terra nullius — no man’s land. Terra nullius was the legal fiction that European empires used to justify the colonization of Australia, the Americas, and large parts of Africa. In the 21st century, genuine terra nullius is almost nonexistent — virtually every square meter of the Earth’s land surface is claimed by at least one state. The Croatia-Serbia Danube pockets are among the last places on the planet where competing border claims have accidentally produced unclaimed territory between two European states, on the border of the EU, in the middle of NATO’s eastern flank.

    Gornja Siga — the largest pocket, 7 square kilometers of Danube floodplain and forest — is where Liberland declared itself in 2015. Jedlička’s project has attracted 600,000 online citizenship applications, operates a government structure with a president, vice president, and four ministers, uses blockchain-based governance systems, and has established an intermittent physical presence on the territory despite repeated Croatian police interventions. Croatia does not claim Gornja Siga — its own official maps show the territory outside Croatian borders — but Croatian police arrest anyone who tries to enter it, on the grounds that access requires crossing Croatian territory. Serbia’s foreign ministry issued a statement in 2015 that Liberland “does not infringe upon” Serbian territory — the closest thing to a non-objection that any recognized state has offered.

    The Croatian law professor who called Liberland “a circus which threatens Croatian territory” identified the actual risk: the longer the terra nullius persists, the more entities — serious or not — will attempt to claim it, and the attention those claims draw to the dispute undermines Croatia’s position on the larger 140-square-kilometer disagreement. The disputed borders post documented 150+ active territorial disputes. The Croatia-Serbia Danube dispute is the one where the dispute itself produced unclaimed territory, and the unclaimed territory produced a micronation, and the micronation produced a legal headache that neither country can resolve without first agreeing on the border they’ve been arguing about since 1945.

    The Vukovar dimension

    The dispute cannot be separated from the trauma of the Croatian War of Independence — specifically the siege of Vukovar in 1991, one of the most devastating battles in Europe since World War II. Vukovar sits directly on the disputed section of the Danube. The Serbian claim to the river boundary would place Croatian territory — including river islands historically administered by the Vukovar district — under Serbian control. For Croatia, the border dispute is not an abstract cartographic disagreement. It is entangled with the memory of a city destroyed by Serbian forces, a hospital massacre documented by the ICTY, and a postwar reintegration process that required UN administration (UNTAES) to return Eastern Slavonia to Croatian sovereignty in 1998. A 2002 incident in which a Yugoslav Army patrol boat fired warning shots at Croatian officials attempting to reach Bačka Palanka by boat on the Danube demonstrates that the river boundary is not a theoretical question — it is a question about who controls the waterway and the territory adjacent to a city that both nations treat as a symbol.

    Why it’s in the course

    The Croatia-Serbia Danube dispute is the Off The Map case study in what happens when geography and cartography disagree — when the physical feature a border is supposed to follow moves, and the two countries on either side cannot agree whether the border moves with it. The Ilemi Triangle is a dispute caused by colonial cartographers who drew five incompatible lines. The Fergana Valley is a dispute caused by Soviet ideologues who drew borders to match ethnic categories that didn’t exist. The Croatia-Serbia dispute is caused by a river that moved, a map that didn’t, and a federation that dissolved before anyone reconciled the two. The river, the map, and the dissolution — three variables that no one coordinated and everyone inherited.

    Transnistria is off the map because of a patron’s withdrawal. Azawad is off the map because of a state’s disintegration. Picher and Centralia are off the map because the ground rejected human occupation. The Danube pockets are off the map in the most literal possible sense: they are land that does not appear on either country’s maps as belonging to that country, governed by nobody, claimed by nobody, patrolled by one country’s police but not that country’s cartographers, and occupied — intermittently, illegally, and with a blockchain governance platform — by a Czech libertarian who noticed that two European nations had accidentally created a piece of no man’s land on the border of the EU and decided to start a country on it.

    This is the kind of place our Off The Map course was built to map — where a river moved, a map didn’t, two countries disagree about which one is the border, the disagreement created pockets of land that neither country claims, a libertarian declared one of them a republic, 600,000 people applied for citizenship online, Croatian police arrest anyone who tries to visit land that Croatia’s own maps show is outside Croatia, Serbia’s foreign ministry shrugged, and the border that started this has been in dispute since 1945 — which means the Danube has been in a different place than the map for eighty-one years, and nobody has figured out what to do about it.