Introduction To look at a map of the world, it would appear that its landmass has been divided into a complex, but clearly defined, tapestry of distinct entities – the 193 member states of the United Nations (United Nations, n.d.a). However, within many of these de jure states there exist numerous other forms of governance which claim de facto authority or statehood – in some cases, they claim authority over a state’s whole territory instead of the internationally recognised (de jure) government (as in Afghanistan, Myanmar and Yemen), while in others they claim the independence of a part of an internationally recognised state’s territory (as in the cases of Somaliland, Abkhazia and Transnistria). Given the range of different forms of governance, ideologies and political aims they have, de facto entities share little beyond their formal exclusion from the international system. Indeed, de facto states and authorities can be seen as lying on a spectrum of ‘stateness’ – at one end, they may approximate cases of ‘rebel governance’,1 while at the other extreme de facto states may fulfil many of the typical qualities of statehood and be deeply integrated into international political and economic systems (as in the cases of Kosovo and Taiwan). While not usually considered ‘de facto’, certain sub-national units which claim a high degree of autonomy from a central government – such as Puntland in Somalia or Iraqi Kurdistan (as of 2005 an autonomous region in Iraq) – exhibit many of the same political and economic characteristics, and face many of the same challenges, as ‘true’ de facto states (Johnson and Smaker, 2014; Jüde, 2017). The vast differences between these various entities described as ‘de facto’ (or other equivalent terms) points to the fact that it is an externally applied and politically determined label, which tells us little about the diversity of the entities labelled as such. The decision to attach the label ‘de facto’ may have either a legitimising or delegitimising effect according to the circumstances in which it is applied. Designating armed groups in North East and North West Syria as ‘de facto authorities’ serves to legitimise them, for example, while in the case of the Taliban the label is a delegitimising one. At an analytical level, to call a state ‘de facto’ is an acknowledgement of the empirical fact of its existence in the absence of universal recognition; at a policy level, that same act of non-recognition is a political decision with clear and profound consequences for the lives of the millions of people living under de facto governance around the world. 1 Indeed, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and armed groups such as Karen National Liberation Army and Kachin Independence Army in Myanmar are mentioned in both the ‘rebel governance’ and ‘de facto state’ literatures (see Mampilly, 2015; Aliyev and Souleimanov, 2017; Dembinska and Campana, 2017; Brenner 2019).