Disputed countries: how travelers count Kosovo, Taiwan, and Palestine

If you've been tracking countries for long enough, you eventually run into the same practical question. You land in Pristina, or Taipei, or Bethlehem. You clear a passport control, your passport gets a stamp, you spend a few days in a place that has its own government, its own currency, its own laws. Then you open your travel map back home and stare at the screen, wondering: does this one count?

The answer, like every interesting question in travel geography, is “it depends on the rules you're using.” Kosovo, Taiwan, and Palestine are the three most widely-visited partially-recognized states in the world. None of them is a UN member. All three have their own government, currency, passport, and foreign ministry. Each of them is officially recognized as a country by some governments but not others, and each one is counted differently by different travel databases.

This guide walks through the history of each case — the actual reason why Kosovo is a 2008 declaration and Taiwan is a 1971 UN resolution and Palestine is a 2012 General Assembly vote — and then gets to the traveler's actual question: what do you do on your map? Our answer may not be everyone's, but it's the rule we use on My Travel Maps, and it's defensible.

The question: what makes a “country”?

There is no single global authority that issues a master list of countries. The United Nations comes closest — the 193 member states of the UN General Assembly are the uncontested baseline — but the UN's own membership process is filtered through the Security Council, where any one of five permanent members (the US, UK, France, Russia, and China) can veto an applicant. This means that UN membership reflects not just “is this a country?” but also “do all five permanent Security Council members agree it should be a country?” The gap between those two questions is where our three cases live.

The legal alternative to UN-based counting is the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933), a treaty signed in Uruguay by most of the Americas.^[1] Article 1 says a state exists when it has:

1. A permanent population
2. A defined territory
3. A government
4. The capacity to enter into relations with other states

By this standard, Kosovo, Taiwan, and Palestine are all states. They each have populations, territory, functioning governments, and (at varying levels of formality) diplomatic relations with other states. The Montevideo criteria represent the “declarative” theory of statehood: a state exists when it meets these criteria, regardless of whether other states agree.

The competing “constitutive” theory says that a state exists only when other states recognize it. Under this view, recognition isn't just evidence of statehood — it's the thing that constitutes it. Most modern international law takes a hybrid position, and that hybrid is why Kosovo, Taiwan, and Palestine sit in a category that the law itself is uncomfortable with. They meet the declarative criteria; they don't have the recognition.

Travelers, fortunately, don't have to be consistent with either theory. You can set your own rules. The most common one is: if you landed in a place and it had its own government and its own border control, you visited it. Under that rule, all three of these cases count. Under a strict UN-based rule, none of them do. The sections below explain why.

Taiwan: the Republic of China

Taiwan is the clearest practical case: a fully-functioning state with 23 million people, a thriving democracy, a technology industry that sits at the center of global supply chains, its own military, its own currency, its own passport — and no UN seat. To understand why requires a quick trip through mid-20th-century Chinese history.

How the two Chinas happened

At the end of World War II in 1945, Japan surrendered Taiwan (which it had ruled since 1895) back to the Republic of China, the then-ruling government of mainland China under the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist party. For a few years Taiwan was simply a Chinese province again.

Then, in 1949, the Chinese Civil War ended in victory for Mao Zedong's Communist Party. The KMT government retreated to Taiwan and continued operating as the “Republic of China,” claiming to be the legitimate government of all of China. On the mainland, the Communists declared the People's Republic of China, which made exactly the same claim. For more than two decades, both governments insisted there was one China — and that each of them was it.

The United Nations had to pick one. From 1945 to 1971, the UN seat for “China” was held by the Republic of China (Taiwan), because it was the government the founding members had been dealing with. But as more decolonized nations joined the UN, support grew for transferring the seat to Beijing. On October 25, 1971, the General Assembly passed Resolution 2758, which “restored the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China in the United Nations” and expelled the Republic of China's representatives.^[2] Taiwan has been locked out of UN membership ever since.

The current state of Taiwan's recognition

Because of the “One China” policy, countries that wish to have diplomatic relations with the People's Republic cannot also have diplomatic relations with the Republic of China. Over time, most countries have chosen Beijing. As of recent years, fewer than 15 UN member states formally recognize Taiwan as the sole legitimate China — mostly small island nations in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and a few Latin American states, plus the Holy See.

That list is continuously shrinking as China's diplomatic pressure works. In just the past decade, Panama, the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Nicaragua, Honduras, and several other states have switched their recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

But this is only the formal picture. In practice, almost every country in the world maintains “unofficial” relations with Taiwan through representative offices that function exactly like embassies. The United States, Japan, the UK, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, and dozens of others all have such offices in Taipei, and Taiwan has reciprocal offices in their capitals. These offices issue visas, handle trade, and provide consular services to citizens. The only thing they're not allowed to do is fly national flags.

Taiwan as a travel destination

Visiting Taiwan is, for almost every nationality, the easiest trip to a partially-recognized state in the world. You fly into Taoyuan International Airport, hand over your passport to a Taiwanese border officer, and receive a stamp that says “REPUBLIC OF CHINA” across the top. Many nationalities get visa-free entry for up to 90 days. Taiwan's own passport is one of the more powerful in the world, with visa-free access to over 140 destinations.

From the traveler's perspective, Taiwan feels unambiguously like a country. It has border control. Its laws are its own. Its currency — the New Taiwan dollar — is accepted nowhere else. The government in Taipei is the only one you'll encounter during your trip. Nothing about the experience resembles being in mainland China.

Most travel tools count Taiwan as a separate country. So do we on My Travel Maps — our world map shows Taiwan as a separate clickable country, with its own entry under the ISO code TWN. The 195-country total we quote in our methodology notes, however, technically absorbs Taiwan into the “China” entry, because that's how the UN classification works. This is a tension we're comfortable leaving visible rather than pretending to resolve.

Kosovo: the world's newest European country

Kosovo is roughly the size of Jamaica, with about 1.8 million people, nestled between Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, and North Macedonia in the southeastern corner of the European landmass. It's predominantly ethnically Albanian, and it's the newest European state to claim independence — or the newest disputed province, depending on who you ask.

From Ottoman vilayet to UN administration

Kosovo's political status has been contested for centuries. Under the Ottoman Empire it was a vilayet (province) with an ethnically mixed population. After the First Balkan War in 1912, it became part of the Kingdom of Serbia, then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and — after World War II — an autonomous province inside the Socialist Republic of Serbia, which was itself part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It held substantial self-government under the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, but that autonomy was stripped away by Slobodan Milošević in 1989 in the run-up to the Yugoslav wars.

What followed was a decade of increasing ethnic tension, Serbian repression, and then outright war between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1999, a NATO air campaign forced Serbian withdrawal, and Kosovo passed under UN administration via Security Council Resolution 1244.^[3] For the next nine years, Kosovo existed in a strange legal twilight: technically still a province of Serbia under international law, practically governed by a UN mission.

The 2008 declaration of independence

On February 17, 2008, the Assembly of Kosovo issued a declaration of independence from Serbia. The declaration was signed by 109 of the assembly's 120 members — Serbian-aligned members boycotted the vote — and was immediately recognized by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and several other Western countries. Serbia rejected it, Russia rejected it, and the UN Secretary-General took no position.

Serbia and Russia took the question to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), asking whether Kosovo's declaration had violated international law. In July 2010, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion that the declaration “did not violate general international law.”^[4] The court was careful: it did not rule on whether Kosovo was a state, or on whether other countries had to recognize it. It only ruled on whether the act of declaring independence was illegal. The answer was no.

Recognition math

As of the most recent counts, around 100 UN member states recognize Kosovo as an independent country. The exact number is disputed, because several countries have formally recognized Kosovo and then ambiguously walked their recognition back — Serbia and Russia have pressed these countries to issue withdrawal statements, and the recognition ledger fluctuates year to year.

Five EU members do not recognize Kosovo: Spain, Slovakia, Romania, Cyprus, and Greece (though Greek recognition is ambiguous). Spain's objection is particularly important because it's motivated by concern about separatist movements within Spain itself (Catalonia, the Basque Country). Russia and China also do not recognize Kosovo, and either would veto any UN membership application — which is why Kosovo has never even been able to apply.

Kosovo as a travel destination

For travelers, Kosovo is an easy and well-worn path. You can fly into Pristina International Airport from most major European hubs, arrive via bus from Skopje or Tirana or Belgrade, or drive in across any of the five land borders. You get a Kosovo entry stamp; most Western nationalities get visa-free entry for 90 days. The currency is the euro (unilaterally adopted even though Kosovo is not in the EU or the eurozone). The capital, Pristina, has a statue of Bill Clinton on its main boulevard.

One quirk worth knowing: if your passport has Kosovo stamps, Serbia may refuse you entry at its border, on the grounds that (in its view) you entered Serbian territory from an illegal exit point. This is usually only a problem if you try to enter Serbia directly from Kosovo with a Kosovo entry stamp. Many travelers route via Skopje or Tirana to avoid the issue.

Almost every travel tool counts Kosovo as a separate country. So do we on My Travel Maps — our world map displays Kosovo as a clickable distinct entity, keyed to the ISO code XKX (a special “user-assigned” code that ISO adopted specifically to deal with Kosovo's ambiguous status).

Palestine: an observer state

Palestine is the most legally and politically complex of the three cases, and the most sensitive. It's also the one with the strongest formal legal status — a UN non-member observer state, recognized as a country by more than 140 UN member states. But the territory of the State of Palestine is fragmented, occupied, and partly governed by a different authority than the one that claims it.

The long arc: from Ottoman province to 1948

Palestine — the geographic region, not any particular state — was governed by the Ottoman Empire until World War I. The British took over under a League of Nations mandate from 1922 to 1948. During the mandate period, Jewish immigration (partly as a result of the Balfour Declaration and later the Holocaust) and Arab resistance grew, and the territory became increasingly violent. In 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, the “Partition Plan,” which proposed dividing the territory into separate Jewish and Arab states with an international zone around Jerusalem. Jewish leaders accepted; Arab leaders and surrounding Arab states rejected.

Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, triggering a war that ended with Israeli control over most of the territory the partition plan had assigned to both sides. Gaza passed to Egyptian administration. The West Bank passed to Jordanian administration. No Palestinian Arab state was established. For 19 years, the Palestinian territory was under Egyptian and Jordanian control with no independent government of its own.

1967 to the PLO

The 1967 Six-Day War changed everything. Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt, putting the entire former Mandate territory under Israeli military occupation. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) emerged as the main political vehicle for Palestinian statehood aspirations, and the UN increasingly treated it as the representative of the Palestinian people. In 1974, the PLO was granted “observer entity” status at the UN — a precursor to what would come later.

1988: the first declaration

On November 15, 1988, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, meeting in Algiers, declared the establishment of the State of Palestine. The declaration was recognized by dozens of countries, mostly in the Arab world, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Soviet bloc. It did not secure UN membership, because any application would be vetoed by the United States.

Oslo and the Palestinian Authority

The Oslo Accords (1993–1995) created the Palestinian Authority, a self-government body with jurisdiction over parts of the West Bank and Gaza. The PA is not the same thing as the State of Palestine — it was designed as a transitional body pending a final status agreement that would produce, or not produce, a Palestinian state. That final status agreement has never happened.

2012: the observer state upgrade

On November 29, 2012, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 67/19, upgrading Palestine from “observer entity” to “non-member observer state.” The vote was 138 in favor, 9 against, and 41 abstentions. The nine “no” votes were the United States, Israel, Canada, the Czech Republic, and five small Pacific states.^[5]

This was largely symbolic — Palestine still cannot vote in the General Assembly — but it put Palestine in the same formal UN category as the Holy See, both officially classified as “non-member states.” That's why Palestine is the 195th country on the travel count.

Since 2012, the number of countries formally recognizing the State of Palestine has continued to grow. As of recent years, more than 140 UN member states recognize Palestine as a sovereign country. Major Western holdouts have begun to shift: Sweden recognized Palestine in 2014; Ireland, Norway, and Spain recognized it in 2024. Several other Western European governments have publicly discussed doing the same.

Palestine as a travel destination

Visiting Palestine is both straightforward and complicated. Straightforward because the West Bank is open to tourism: Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jericho, Hebron, and Nablus are all visitable, and many travelers enter via day trips from Jerusalem. Bethlehem in particular receives millions of Christian pilgrims every year. Complicated because entry is controlled by Israel, not by the Palestinian Authority. Your passport is stamped (or not stamped) at Israeli border control. The Palestinian Authority does issue Palestinian passports, but the state's sovereignty over its own borders is, in practice, limited.

Gaza is a separate situation. It has been under blockade since 2007, when Hamas took political control. Travel to Gaza is extremely limited under normal conditions and has been effectively impossible since the outbreak of war in October 2023. Historic travel counts that include Palestine usually refer to visits to the West Bank rather than Gaza.

My Travel Maps displays Palestine as a separate clickable country on the world map, with borders drawn approximately along the generally-recognized territory of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. This is also how Natural Earth (the boundary dataset we use) represents it. For the historical, political, and cartographic reasoning behind that choice, see our methodology page.

Side-by-side: the three cases compared

Other contested cases worth knowing

Taiwan, Kosovo, and Palestine aren't the only partially-recognized states — they're just the three that most travelers actually visit. Here are a few others worth knowing about.

Somaliland

Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in May 1991 and has functioned as a de facto state for more than three decades. It has its own government, army, currency (the Somaliland shilling), passport, parliament, elections, and several consular offices abroad. It's arguably the most developed case of a de facto state with zero formal recognition — not a single UN member has officially recognized it. The main blocker is Somalia, which rejects partition, and the African Union's general reluctance to bless the redrawing of post-colonial borders. Travelers do visit Somaliland (typically via Hargeisa or Berbera), and Natural Earth displays it as a separate territory, though we count it with Somalia on My Travel Maps.

Northern Cyprus

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) declared independence in 1983, nine years after the Turkish military intervention on the island. It is recognized only by Turkey. Every other country — including the rest of the EU — treats the entire island of Cyprus as part of the Republic of Cyprus (a UN and EU member). Travelers going to Northern Cyprus can only fly in via Turkey. Northern Cyprus issues its own stamps but they are not recognized outside Turkey.

Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia

Three post-Soviet separatist regions, all with de facto independence supported by Russia but recognized by almost no one else. Transnistria sits on the Dniester river side of Moldova and is not recognized even by Russia. Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both in northwestern Georgia, were recognized as independent by Russia after its 2008 war with Georgia, followed by recognition from Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru, and Syria. Travel to all three is possible but unusual, and visits rarely appear on mainstream travel maps.

Nagorno-Karabakh / Artsakh (dissolved)

Until September 2023, Nagorno-Karabakh — called the Republic of Artsakh by its own government — was a de facto independent, ethnically Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan. A month-long Azerbaijani military operation in late 2023 led to the region's dissolution and the exodus of virtually the entire ethnic Armenian population to Armenia. The Republic of Artsakh officially ceased to exist on January 1, 2024. Older travel guides still mention it; recent ones don't.

Western Sahara / SADR

The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) claims the Western Sahara territory but controls only a sliver of it; Morocco controls roughly 80% of the territory. SADR is recognized by dozens of African and Latin American states and is a full member of the African Union. Most travel maps show Western Sahara as a separate territory without assigning it to either claimant, which is what we do as well.

How My Travel Maps counts them

Our approach, in plain English:

• We display Kosovo, Taiwan, and Palestine as separate, clickable countries on the world map. Each one has its own polygon and you can toggle them independently in your visited list.
• Our 195-country total follows the UN's classification boundary — 193 UN members + Holy See + Palestine. Under this formal count, Kosovo and Taiwan are absorbed into Serbia and China respectively, because the UN treats them that way.
• This creates a tension — we display things we don't formally count. We're OK with that. The alternative is either to refuse to show Kosovo and Taiwan (which would be weird and politically loaded), or to inflate the total to 197 or 198 or 200+ and have to defend every addition case by case.
• For other cases — Somaliland, Northern Cyprus, Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia — we follow the boundaries drawn by Natural Earth, the open-source mapping dataset we use. Somaliland is shown as part of Somalia; Northern Cyprus is shown as part of Cyprus. Our methodology page walks through every case in detail.
• For territories like Greenland, Puerto Rico, and the Faroe Islands, we don't count them as separate countries — they're attached to Denmark, the US, and Denmark respectively. If you want to track a visit to any of them specifically, the city pins tool lets you drop a pin at any location on Earth.

Practical advice for travelers

If you're tracking travel history and wondering what to do with these cases, here's what we'd suggest:

• Count what feels right to you. Nobody audits your travel journal. If you felt like you were in a different country when you landed in Pristina, count it. If you want to be strict about UN membership, don't. Both approaches are honest.
• Be consistent. Pick a rule and stick to it. The weird ones are the travelers who count Taiwan (which isn't on the 195 list) but not Kosovo (which also isn't). Pick one convention and apply it across all cases.
• Know what your travel database does. Different apps and websites count differently. If the number matters to you, check the rules of whatever tool you're using. Most major travel trackers follow the “display separately, count separately” convention, which means Kosovo and Taiwan both count as individual entries.
• Be aware of border politics. Kosovo stamps cause problems at Serbian borders. Israeli border stamps can cause problems entering certain Arab states that don't recognize Israel. Visits to Gaza are essentially impossible under current conditions. These practical realities matter more than recognition math.
• Remember that recognition changes. The lists of which countries recognize which states fluctuate year to year, and a case that's contested today may be settled or dissolved tomorrow. Artsakh was counted on many maps in 2022 and nowhere in 2024. The map moves.

Frequently asked questions

Is Taiwan a country?

Under the Montevideo criteria, yes — Taiwan has a population, territory, government, and the capacity to enter relations with other states. Under a UN-membership definition, no — Taiwan is not a UN member and was expelled in 1971. In practice, every government in the world does business with Taiwan. Most travelers count it. We display it as a separate country on our maps.

Is Kosovo a country?

About 100 UN member states say yes, including the United States, the UK, France, and most of the EU (but not Spain, Slovakia, Romania, Cyprus, or Greece). Serbia, Russia, and China say no. The ICJ ruled in 2010 that Kosovo's declaration of independence did not violate international law. Kosovo has never been able to apply for UN membership because Russia and China would veto. Most travelers count Kosovo as a country.

Is Palestine a country?

Legally speaking, Palestine has the strongest formal position of the three: it is a UN non-member observer state, recognized by over 140 UN member states, and formally in the same observer category as the Holy See. The practical situation is more complicated — parts of the claimed territory are under Israeli administration, and Gaza is effectively inaccessible under current conditions. Under the 195-country travel count, Palestine is one of the 195.

What about Scotland or Catalonia?

Neither is a UN member, and neither has declared independence successfully. Scotland held an independence referendum in 2014 and voted 55% to 45% against leaving the UK. Catalonia held a 2017 referendum that Spain declared illegal. Neither is in any practical sense a “country” today — they're constituent parts of the UK and Spain, with strong independence movements but no state. They don't appear on any mainstream country-visited list.

Should I tell customs I'm going to Kosovo if I'm then going to Serbia?

Probably not via the direct land route. Entering Serbia with a Kosovo entry stamp in your passport can cause problems, because (from Serbia's perspective) you entered Serbian territory illegally. The usual workaround is to exit Kosovo via a third country (Albania, North Macedonia) before entering Serbia.

What's the difference between being recognized and being a UN member?

Every UN member state is automatically recognized by every other UN member (formally, at least, although day-to-day diplomacy can still refuse to engage). But a country can be recognized by many states without being a UN member. Kosovo has ~100 recognitions without UN membership. Palestine has ~145 recognitions and is a non-member observer state. Recognition and membership are parallel tracks that usually converge but don't have to.

Are there other disputed countries you didn't mention?

Several, mostly small and not widely visited: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (a sovereign entity with no territory), and — at the edge — cases like the Donetsk and Luhansk “People's Republics” proclaimed in eastern Ukraine. None of these are displayed as separate countries on our maps.

The bottom line

Kosovo, Taiwan, and Palestine are three of the most politically interesting places in the world, and they're also three places where the simple question “is this a country?” has no simple answer. All three meet the declarative criteria for statehood. None of them is a UN member. All three can be visited by travelers with varying degrees of ease, and all three are usually counted on travel maps — including ours.

The practical question for a traveler comes down to: does it feel like I visited a different country?For Taiwan, Kosovo, and (the visitable parts of) Palestine, the honest answer is almost always yes. Border control was different. Currency was different. Language, food, politics — different. If you set foot in Pristina, you can comfortably tell people you visited Kosovo. If you flew into Taipei and cleared Taiwanese immigration, you visited Taiwan. If you spent an afternoon in Bethlehem, you visited Palestine.

The UN's classification system, the ICJ's advisory opinions, the recognition math between nations — all of that is important, and all of it is the reason these cases are interesting. But the traveler's question — “do I count it?” — has a practical answer that doesn't require solving the underlying political dispute. Count what you visited. Be consistent. And if the count doesn't match the UN's, that's fine — the UN isn't making your travel map.

For more context, read our other pieces on how many countries are in the world and the 7 continents. And if you want to start adding these cases to your own map, the countries visited map has every disputed case pre-drawn and ready to click.