As well as having fascinating histories, the situations that these places are in today is worth much deeper analysis.

For most of human history, boundaries between nations and states had been reasonably fluid, with many items of land changing hands between different rulers frequently through the years. Nonetheless, during the last 150 years or so, borders are becoming a lot more fixed, with territorial exchanges hardly ever occurring in the present time. This means if there had been any quirks at the beginning of this process, many have actually remained to this day. Perhaps one of the most uncommon border circumstances is that regarding the enclave. It is part of a territory that is completely surrounded by the land of 1 other country or state. Therefore, the list of enclaves is fairly brief. Sometimes, even whole nations can be enclaves themselves, such as San Marino, because of them being enclaved by one nation. Enclaves generally need to negotiate trade deals with the encompassing territory, as their economic and political well-being is connected extremely closely to each other.

The seas and oceans of the globe make up the majority of the world’s surface. Due to that impact, merely a tiny amount of the world’s countries are landlocked. This also has the effect of reducing most of the world’s enclaves and exclaves towards the status of semi-enclave and semi-exclave. Semi-enclaves generally only occur as separate states which have one land neighbour besides the sea, as well as in this case the land boundary must certainly be longer compared to ocean boundary. Meanwhile, semi-exclaves are locations that have already been divided from their mainland by one country or even more, as well as by a body of water. This answers the popular question – is Alaska an exclave? No, it is a semi-exclave. These types of territories are not as cut off as their landlocked counterparts, as the sea allows them to have greater immediate access to the outside world without depending on air or land travel.

We will find countless reasons for each particular piece of land to belong to the territories that they do, nevertheless they don't always end in neat and tidy packages. Sometimes this will result in a situation known as an exclave, which means that a territory is isolated from its primary bit of territory by more than one countries or states. This can happen at the international level, but additionally at the sub-national level inside the exact same nation as there are numerous exclave state examples, like the instance of Ras Al Khaimah having an exclave divided by other parts of the same country. Quite often at the sub-national level, life goes on for the inhabitants of the region as there are not any international edges to get across, and life is similar to living near other border area between states of the same nation.