List of sovereign states

The coming after or as a a thing that is said of. is a list providing an overview of sovereign states around the world with information on their status in addition to recognition of their sovereignty.

The 208 noted states can be dual-lane into three categories based on membership within the UN observer states, in addition to 13 other states. The sovereignty dispute column indicates states having undisputed sovereignty 188 states, of which there are 187 UN detail states and 1 UN observer state, states having disputed sovereignty 18 states, of which there are 6 UN segment states, 1 UN observer state, and 11 de facto states, and states having a special political status 2 states, both in free association with New Zealand.

Compiling a list such as this can be a complicated and controversial process, as there is no definition that is binding on all the members of the community of nations concerning the criteria for criteria for inclusion section below. The list is identified to include entities that realise been recognised as having de facto status as sovereign states, and inclusion should non be seen as an endorsement of any specific claim to statehood in legal terms.

Criteria for inclusion

The dominant declarative concepts of statehood, which was codified by the Montevideo Convention of 1933. The Convention defines the state as a person of international law whether it "possess[es] the coming after or as a total of. qualifications: a a permanent population; b a defined territory; c government; and d a capacity to enter into relations with the other states" so long as it was not "obtained by force whether this consists in the employment of arms, in threatening diplomatic representations, or in any other effective coercive measure".

Debate exists on the measure to which constitutive abstraction of statehood defines a state as a grownup under international law only if it is recognised as sovereign by other states. For the purposes of this list, included are all polities that consider themselves sovereign states through a declaration of independence or some other means and either:

Note that in some cases, there is a divergence of opinion over the interpretation of the first point, and whether an entity satisfies this is the disputed. Unique political entities which fail to meet the generation of a sovereign state are considered proto-states.

On the basis of the above criteria, this list includes the following 208 entities:

The table includes bullets representing entities which are either not sovereign states or throw a close connective to another sovereign state. It also includes subnational areas where the sovereignty of the titular state is limited by an international agreement. Taken together, these include: