Enclaves are defined as a fragment of one country totally surrounded by one other. A list of the world’s current enclaves and a review of the literature about them reveals a geographical bias that has left enclaves outside western Europe almost untouched. This bias is particularly noticeable in the almost complete absence of information on the Cooch Behar enclaves, along Bangladesh’s northern border with India. The Cooch Behar enclaves number almost 200. This total includes about two dozen counter-enclaves (enclaves within enclaves), and the world’s only counter-counter-enclave. Together, these enclaves represent 80% of the total number of enclaves existing in the world since the 1950s, and have been at the centre of Indo-East Pakistani and then Indo-Bangladeshi boundary disputes since Cooch Behar acceded to India in 1949. (For complete abstract open document)

Attempting to provide a fully-fledged theory of enclaves and exclaves, A Theory of Enclaves covers a wide scope of regions and territories throughout the world and satisfies the need for a systematic view on enclaves. This book covers 282 enclaves, with a combined population total of approximately three million, but the importance of enclaves is much higher because of their specific status and issues raised for both the mainland states and the surrounding states: Gibraltar was disproportionately large for British-Spanish relations throughout the last three centuries, Kaliningrad managed to cause a major crisis in the EU-Russian relations in 2002-03, Tiny Ceuta and Melilla have caused tensions in Spanish-Moroccan relations for more than three centuries and have recently become visible as conflict points at the EU level, German Buesingen was subject to several complex international treaties between Germany and Switzerland. Rather than viewing each enclave as a unique case, or even as an anomaly, A Theory of Enclaves provides a systematic investigation of enclave-related political and economic issues. Rich on maps and illustrations, A Theory of Enclaves strives to comprise three facets of enclaves' existence: political, economic, and social life.

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Chitmahal is the enclaves between India and Bangladesh border in the Indian state of West Bengal. India has about 92 exclaves of Bangladesh, and 106 exclaves of India are within Bangladeshi soil. The enclaves were part of the high stake card or chess games centuries ago between two regional kings, the Raja of Cooch Behar and the Maharaja of Rangpur. The little territories were the result of a confused outcome of a treaty between the Kingdom of Koch Bihar and the Mughal Empire.

Islands have a unique hold on our imagination as intriguing places where - as Thomas More and Jonathan Swift showed in their fiction - fantastic utopic or dystopic worlds are possible. Perhaps such ideas developed because we are implicitly aware of the unique political and social arrangements that can be designed when a region is so distinctly separate.Island Enclaves highlights the idiosyncratic forms of governance that occur in places that are both a part of, and apart from, national boundaries. Examining subnational island jurisdictions such as Guantanamo Bay, Macau, Aruba, the Isle of Man, and Prince Edward Island, Godfrey Baldacchino shows how these distinct locales arrange special relationships with larger metropolitan powers. He also deals with the politics, economics, and diplomacy of islands that have been engineered as detention camps, offshore finance centres, military bases, heritage parks or otherwise autonomous regions. More than a study of how detached regions are governed, Island Enclaves displays the ways in which these jurisdictions are pioneering some of the modern world's most creative - and shadowy - forms of sovereignty and government.