Enclaves & Exclaves

A tour of the world's geographically engulfed and orphaned places

John Nelson

*Geopolitical curiosities & troubled lands* | Part 2

The world is riddled with amazing little pockets of isolation. Not in the personal sense, though that could be said of the world as well, but in terms of boundaries between local and national entities—boundaries that occasionally completely swallow up a region within itself like an amoeba, or boundaries that leave little orphaned pockets of territory floating beyond the motherland. Enclaves and exclaves.

An enclave is a territory that is completely surrounded by the territory of one other state.

An exclave is a part of a state that is geographically separated from the main part by the territory of one or more states.

Enclaves are inner and Exclaves are outer. Seems…maybe…simple enough. But things get weird fast. This illustration may help shed some light…

How do enclaves and exclaves work?

Here are the four made-up countries of A, B, C, and D.

Country D is an enclave. It is enclaved by B.

What makes it an enclave? It is wholly surrounded by just one other territory.

This is Country A, and it has three exclaves: A1, A2, and A3.

Say, can exclaves (orphaned chunks) also be enclaves (wholly surrounded chunks)? Sure!

Do any of these exclaves also happen to be enclaves? Let's take a look...

The exclave A1 is not a "true" enclave, because it touches the sea. It's called a "semi-enclave" because it is surrounded by C and C's territorial waters.

A technicality, right? That's because all enclaves and exclaves are technicalities! If you are a practical person who doesn't like to get caught up in the minutae of borderland details, perhaps it's best to stop reading now.

The exclave A2 is not an enclave because it shares borders with B and C. A true enclave has to be wholly surrounded by a single territory.

The exclave A3, on the other hand, is definitely also an enclave. Specifically, A3 is an exclave of Country A and an enclave within Country B.

OK, this is exhausting (or exhilarating, depending on your predilection for topological legalism).

But buckle up, it gets crazier…

Imagine there was an enclave County E, inside Country A.

Okay, no problem, we covered that.

But what if, within Country E, there was another enclave? A nested enclave?

That's called a counter-enclave, and it happens. There are even counter-counter-enclaves out there. In the real world. Somehow.

Tired of fiction?

Let’s look at some actual examples. There are three countries that are true enclaves. And two of them are in Italy!

National enclaves

The Vatican City is an ecclesiastical state of the Roman Catholic Church ruled by the Pope.

At less than half of a square kilometer, and a population of just 842, the Vatican City is the world’s smallest sovereign state.

The Vatican City avoided Italian unification in the 19th century in a tenuous series of resistances and political compromises, so that today it is wholly surrounded by one country, making it one of three true national enclaves.

Across the Italian peninsula from the Vatican City, the Republic of San Marino, the oldest constitutional republic (as well as perhaps the oldest continual sovereign state), is a small nation of 33,000 folks perched on a series of hilltops within Italy.

During the Italian unification process, San Marino accommodated those who were fleeing persecution for their reunification efforts.

As a result, San Marino was granted, somewhat ironically, an exemption from that merging of city-states and remained a sovereign entity, becoming a true national enclave.

Perhaps the most distinct of the national enclaves, in that it is readily visible at a global scale, is the Kingdom of Lesotho. The high, mountainous plains of land-locked Lesotho carve a round scoop out of surrounding South Africa.

The era of imperialism saw colonial annexation, by the Dutch and then the British, of the area that is now Lesotho and South Africa.

South Africa declared independence from British rule in 1961, unifying and nationalizing the territory surrounding what is now Lesotho, making that territory, temporarily, a sub-national exclave of Britain (enclaved by South Africa).

The Kingdom of Lesotho then declared its independence in 1966—becoming what is now the largest true national enclave.

Wait a second, just three national enclaves? What about little Andorra, in the Pyrenees Mountains?

No...Andorra is not an enclave because it is bordered by more than one country.

Otherwise all land-locked countries would be enclaves and we wouldn't need the word enclave, since we could just use "landlocked." But then anthropologists and geographers needing a thesis topic would have to create a word for a place that is landlocked-by-only-one-country and they would probably come up with "enclave."

In any case, while Andorra is not an enclave, do you notice that even tinier parcel near Andorra that actually is fully surrounded by one country?

It's Llívia! Llívia is a small portion of Spain set adrift in France. That makes it an exclave! It's also fully surrounded by one country, France, which means it's also an enclave.

In the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees, Llívia remained a part of Spain based on the technicality that it was considered a "villa" while the treaty stipulated that "villages" would be ceded to the French kingdom.

If there is one lesson to learn from the study of enclaves, it is to never underestimate the shrewdness of diplomats.

Exclaves

So what other interesting exclaves are out there?

Well, how much time do you have?

The Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic is an exclave of Azerbaijan. Home to a population of nearly a half-million, predominantly ethnic Azeris, this territory is bordered by Armenia to the east and Iran to the west. And it happens to sit some twenty miles away from the mainland of Azerbaijan.

Victims of a long history of ethnic conflict, most Armenians fled Nakhchivan in the early twentieth century.

In 1990 Nakhchivan became the first territory to secede from the Soviet Union. The ensuing breakup eventually resulted in the independence of Armenia and Azerbaijan, among others, with Nakhchivan as a non-contiguous part of Azerbaijan—an exclave.

You may have noticed that there are additional fragmented territories on this map. They are exclaves of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

But the geopolitical complexities of the area don't stop there. The exclave Nakhchivan has its own exclave, the village of Karki.

An exclave of an exclave? Yes. Such are the complex weavings of culture, ethnicity, and bureaucracy at frothy borders of dispute.

So many exclaves peppered across the world exist in ethnic and political unease, or are embroiled in outright struggle...

Like so many other exclave-bearing regions, the Fergana Valley has a long history of trade, settlement, empire, and disintegration.

Residents of the Fergana Valley, living in ethnically distinct exclaves scattered around the border between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, find themselves surrounded by mortal enemies.

Counter-Enclaves & Counter-Counter-Enclaves

So, we've seen enclaves, exclaves, and even exclaves of exclaves. What about enclaves within enclaves: Counter-enclaves? They're out there alright. And here is one...

When the seven emirates of the northeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula formed a federation in 1971, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), drawing the borders was a complex undertaking.

Within the UAE there is an exclave of Oman. It's an exclave because it's a part of one territory surrounded by another. It also happens to be an enclave because it is surrounded by only one entity.

Within that Omani exclave-which-is-also-an-enclave is a the small UAE village of Nahwa.

Nahwa is a second-order enclave. It's also a second-order exclave, since it is an exclave situated within an exclave.

Wow.

There are loads of exclave-enclaves nested municipalities scattered throughout the world. Most are tiny. Speaking of tiny...

In July of 2015, 173 small enclaves (as well as the 27 counter-enclaves within them) known as "chitmahals" near the border of India and Bangladesh reverted to their engulfing counterparts. Residents of the now-popped enclaves are allowed to relocate to the mainland of their parent country. Conveniently, the residents of counter-enclaves should have found the transition appealing, since their sphere-with-a-sphere status dissolved, making them regular residents of the parent country, if they so choose.

A diagram of the enclaved cultural communities along the border of India and Bangladesh (then East Pakistan).

Interestingly, this area was home to the world's only counter-counter-enclave. That's an enclave within an enclave within an enclave. That bubble within a bubble within a bubble burst right along with the juicy bit of trivia coveted by the world's handful of enclave aficionados.

There's more!

Can't seem to get enough of nested and ousted boundaries? If so, feast upon the voluminous list in Wikipedia's page on enclaves and exclaves . There, you may also be sucked into the gravity of " practical " enclaves, named so because of natural features, rather than political boundaries, that alienate a place. Also, the term enclave can be used for all sorts of purposes, like areas that have a strong concentration of ethnic minorities.

Because boundaries are relatively fluid things, and humankind being what we are, and as factions split and merge, we create all sorts of interesting topological anomalies. So we can expect to see enclaves and exclaves be born, evolve, and die, well into the future. Anthropologists, geographers, and the downright curious will have no want for material.