Bougainville is a region of Papua New Guinea which in 2019 overwhelmingly voted to be independent. In 2021, the PNG government agreed to let it do so no earlier than 2025 and no later than 2027. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fb0KNhsARo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bougainvillean_independence_referendum ) It doesn't seem to me like any group is especially trying to stop or delay this, but things happen.
Since I memorized the countries using the Sporcle "Countries of the World" quiz (https://www.sporcle.com/games/g/world), I have an irrational attachment to it being the definitive list of countries. (It includes all 195 UN member and observer states, Taiwan, and Kosovo.) This market resolves YES if Bougainville is added as an answer in that quiz before the end of 2027 and remains there for a continuous week, otherwise NO. If Bougainville goes by a different name, it still counts, as long as it controls roughly the same territory.
(If the Sporcle quiz is clearly an outlier for some reason, and everyone agrees that it is wrong on the question of whether Bougainville is a country, I will use common sense.)
General policy for my markets: In the rare event of a conflict between my resolution criteria and the agreed-upon common-sense spirit of the market, I may resolve it according to the market's spirit or N/A, probably after discussion.
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I'm getting much less optimistic about this happening. At first each time the PNG government found a way not to make any movement on this, I figured it was just busy. It's happened enough now I'm starting to suspect they are purposefully stalling.
https://thediplomat.com/2025/03/bougainville-continues-its-struggle-for-independence/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/27/political-deadlock-frustrates-bougainvilles-aspirations-of-independence
"After high-level talks stalled, parliamentary ratification, which was supposed to take place last year, failed to happen. Achieving it this year is “a possibility, but not yet a likelihood”, Professor Anthony Regan of the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University (ANU) told Al Jazeera."
It looks like the Papua New Guinean government has settled on independence requiring a simple majority vote in parliament (after the PM previously tried to say it was a super majority).
Here is an overview from late last year I thought decent.
Here's another from June of this year.
I think the current probability is fair.
I'm choosing this market to showcase because it asks a pretty canonical geopolitics question: will a place really become a new country, even if it seems like everyone's agreed?
Also, I've been interested in the fact that it's trading pretty close to the "new country" markets, and am curious if that will remain true even with the subsidy.