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Sovereign state

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State CapacityWar & Peace

What you should know about this indicator

Gleditsch and Ward consider a country a sovereign state if its administration of a territory is relatively autonomous and it is considered independent by local actors and other states. They discuss many cases here:

Sovereign state
The country is identified as a sovereign state by Gleditsch and Ward dataset.
Source
Gleditsch and Ward (2007) – with minor processing by
Last updated
August 27, 2024
Next expected update
August 2029
Date range
1816–2023

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

We examine the criteria for membership in the international system as applied in the widely employed system membership list maintained by the Correlates of War Project. Some problems with existing classifications are illustrated and some analytical and empirical consequences of these problems are detailed. Using updated criteria and information, we develop a revised and updated list of the composition of the international system of nation state actors in world politics from the Congress of Vienna to the present.

Retrieved on
September 22, 2023
Retrieved from
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by . To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Gleditsch, Kristian S. & Michael D. Ward. 1999. "Interstate System Membership: A Revised List of the Independent States since 1816." International Interactions 25: 393-413.

How we process data at

All data and visualizations on rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across .

Notes on our processing step for this indicator

We use the list of independent states and microstates from Gleditsch and Ward. We assign each country to a region based on the mapping (using GW codes):

  • Americas: 2-199
  • Europe: 200-399
  • Africa: 400-626
  • Middle East: 630-699
  • Asia and Oceania: 700-999

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by are completely open access under the . You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by , please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Sovereign state”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada (2023) - “State Capacity”. Data adapted from Gleditsch and Ward. Retrieved from /grapher/sovereign-state-gleditsch-ward [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Gleditsch and Ward (2007) – with minor processing by

Full citation

Gleditsch and Ward (2007) – with minor processing by . “Sovereign state” [dataset]. Gleditsch and Ward, “List of independent states 3.2” [original data]. Retrieved April 28, 2025 from /grapher/sovereign-state-gleditsch-ward