State (polity) in the context of National state

A capital city, or just capital, is the municipality holding primary status in a country, state, province, department, or other subnational division, usually as its seat of government. A capital is typically a city that physically encompasses the government's offices and meeting places; the status as capital is often designated by law or a constitution. In some jurisdictions, including several countries, different branches of government are in different settlements, sometimes meaning there are multiple official capitals. In some cases, a distinction is made between the official (constitutional) capital and the seat of government.

English-language media often use the name of the capital metonymically to refer to the government sitting there. Thus, "London–Washington relations" is understood to mean diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the United States.

A cradle of civilization is a location and a culture where civilization was developed independently of other civilizations in other locations. A civilization is any complex society characterized by the development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond signed or spoken languages (namely, writing systems and graphic arts).

Scholars generally acknowledge six cradles of civilization: Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India and Ancient China are believed to be the earliest in Afro-Eurasia, while the Caral–Supe civilization of coastal Peru and the Olmec civilization of Mexico are believed to be the earliest in the Americas. All of the cradles of civilization depended upon agriculture for sustenance (except possibly Caral–Supe which may have depended initially on marine resources). All depended upon farmers producing an agricultural surplus to support the centralized government, political leaders, religious leaders, and public works of the urban centers of the early civilizations.

A country is an area of land, which has its own government and laws, or used to have them, such as a state, a nation, a nation state, or other political entity. When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may refer to a sovereign state, a state with limited recognition, a constituent country, or a dependent territory. Most sovereign states, but not all countries, are members of the United Nations.

There is no universal agreement on the number of "countries" in the world with a range between 193 to 237. This ambiguity is a result of several states having disputed sovereignty status or limited recognition, and a number of non-sovereign entities are commonly considered countries. The definition and usage of the word "country" has fluctuated and changed over time. The Economist wrote in 2010 that "any attempt to find a clear definition of a country soon runs into a thicket of exceptions and anomalies."

A seat of government is a "building, complex of buildings or the city from which a government exercises its authority". When referring to a city, the seat of government is generally the capital of the state or administrative entity in question, although there are exceptions. Particular terms for the seat of certain territorial subdivisions are administrative centre, county seat (common in the United States), county town (United Kingdom and Ireland), or barrio-pueblo (Puerto Rico), among others; buildings that may function as seats of government include official residences, supreme court buildings, city or town halls, administrative or executive buildings, shire or county halls, legislative buildings, and barangay halls.

A metropolitan area or metro is a region consisting of a densely populated urban agglomeration and its surrounding territories which share industries, commercial areas, transport network, infrastructure and housing. A metropolitan area usually comprises multiple principal cities, jurisdictions and municipalities: neighborhoods, townships, boroughs, cities, towns, exurbs, suburbs, counties, districts and even states and nations in areas like the eurodistricts. As social, economic and political institutions have changed, metropolitan areas have become key economic and political regions.

In the United States, metropolitan areas are delineated around the core of a core based statistical area, which is defined as an urban area and includes central and outlying counties. In other countries metropolitan areas are sometimes anchored by one central city such as the Paris metropolitan area (Paris). In other cases, metropolitan areas contain multiple centers of equal or close to equal importance, especially in the United States; for example, the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area has eight principal cities. The Islamabad–Rawalpindi metropolitan area in Pakistan, the Rhine-Ruhr in Germany, and the Randstad in The Netherlands are other examples.

A supranational union is a type of international organization and political union that is empowered to directly exercise some of the powers and functions otherwise reserved to states. A supranational organization involves a greater transfer of or limitation of state sovereignty than other kinds of international organizations.

The European Union (EU) has been described as a paradigmatic case of a supranational organization, as it has deep political, economic and social integration, which includes a common market, joint border control, a supreme court, and regular popular elections.

Hegemony (/hɛˈdʒɛməni/ , UK also /hɪˈɡɛməni/, US also /ˈhɛdʒəmoʊni/) is the political, economic, and military predominance of one state over other states, either regional or global.

In Ancient Greece (ca. 8th BC – AD 6th c.), hegemony denoted the politico-military dominance of the hegemon city-state over other city-states. In the 19th century, hegemony denoted the "social or cultural predominance or ascendancy; predominance by one group within a society or milieu" and "a group or regime which exerts undue influence within a society".

Sovereignty can generally be defined as supreme, independent control and lawmaking authority over a territory. It finds expression in the power to rule and make law. Sovereignty entails hierarchy within a state as well as external autonomy for states. In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the person, body or institution that has the ultimate authority over other people and to change existing laws. In political theory, sovereignty is a substantive term designating supreme legitimate authority over some polity. Under international law, sovereign states are all considered equal, and no state can interfere with the internal affairs of another sovereign state. While Article 2(7) of the UN Charter explicitly recognizes the sovereignty of states, and in general there is a principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states, the UN Security Council’s Chapter VII powers clearly contemplate the use of force against a state when necessary to restore peace. Further, the recent Responsibility to Protect (R2P) authorizes the United Nations to take action to “avert a humanitarian catastrophe” within a state when that state’s government cannot or will not act.

A state is generally considered to have sovereignty over a territory when it has consistently exercised state authority there without objection from other states. De jure sovereignty refers to the legal right to do so; de facto sovereignty refers to the factual ability to do so. This can become an issue of special concern upon the failure of the usual expectation that de jure and de facto sovereignty exist at the place and time of concern, and reside within the same organization.

The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to various nations and states in Western Europe, Northern America, and Australasia; with some debate as to whether those in Eastern Europe and Latin America also constitute the West. The Western world likewise is called the Occident (from Latin occidens 'setting down, sunset, west') in contrast to the Eastern world known as the Orient (from Latin oriens 'origin, sunrise, east'). Definitions of the "Western world" vary according to context and perspectives; the West is an evolving concept made up of cultural, political, and economic synergy among diverse groups of people, and not a rigid region with fixed borders and members.

Some historians contend that a linear development of the West can be traced from Ancient Greece and Rome, while others argue that such a projection constructs a false genealogy. A geographical concept of the West started to take shape in the 4th century CE when Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, divided the Roman Empire between the Greek East and Latin West. The East Roman Empire, later called the Byzantine Empire, continued for a millennium, while the West Roman Empire lasted for only about a century and a half. Significant theological and ecclesiastical differences led Western Europeans to consider the Christians in the Byzantine Empire as heretics. In 1054 CE, when the church in Rome excommunicated the patriarch of Byzantium, the politico-religious division between the Western church and Eastern church culminated in the Great Schism or the East–West Schism. Even though friendly relations continued between the two parts of Christendom for some time, the crusades made the schism definitive with hostility. The West during these crusades tried to capture trade routes to the East and failed, it instead discovered the Americas. In the aftermath of the European colonization of the Americas, primarily involving Western European powers, an idea of the "Western" world, as an inheritor of Latin Christendom emerged. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest reference to the term "Western world" was from 1586, found in the writings of William Warner.

A declaration of war is a formal act by which one state announces existing or impending war activity against another. The declaration is a performative speech act (or the public signing of a document) by an authorized party of a national government, in order to create a state of war between two or more states.

The legality of who is competent to declare war varies between nations and forms of government. In many nations, that power is given to the head of state or sovereign. In other cases, something short of a full declaration of war, such as a letter of marque or a covert operation, may authorise war-like acts by privateers or mercenaries. The official international protocol for declaring war was defined in the Hague Convention (III) of 1907 on the Opening of Hostilities.

Humans, scientifically known as Homo sapiens, are primates that belong to the biological family of great apes and are characterized by hairlessness, bipedality, and high intelligence. Humans have large brains compared to body size, enabling more advanced cognitive skills that facilitate successful adaptation to varied environments, development of sophisticated tools, and formation of complex social structures and civilizations.

Humans are highly social, with individual humans tending to belong to a multi-layered network of distinct social groups – from families and peer groups to corporations and political states. As such, social interactions between humans have established a wide variety of values, social norms, languages, and traditions (collectively termed institutions), each of which bolsters human society. Humans are also highly curious: the desire to understand and influence phenomena has motivated humanity's development of science, technology, philosophy, mythology, religion, and other frameworks of knowledge; humans also study themselves through such domains as anthropology, social science, history, psychology, and medicine. As of 2025, there are estimated to be more than 8 billion living humans.

A civilization (also spelled civilisation in British English) is any complex society characterized by the development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond signed or spoken languages (namely, writing systems).

Civilizations are organized around densely populated settlements, divided into more or less rigid hierarchical social classes of division of labour, often with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture and trade. Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings. Civilizations are characterized by elaborate agriculture, architecture, infrastructure, technological advancement, currency, taxation, regulation, and specialization of labour.

Political philosophy studies the theoretical and conceptual foundations of politics. It examines the nature, scope, and legitimacy of political institutions, such as states. The field investigates different forms of government, ranging from democracy to authoritarianism, and the values guiding political action, like justice, equality, and liberty. As a normative field, political philosophy focuses on desirable norms and values, in contrast to political science, which emphasizes empirical description.

Political ideologies are systems of ideas and principles that outline how society should work. Anarchism rejects the coercive power of centralized governments. It proposes a stateless society to promote liberty and equality. Conservatism seeks to preserve traditional institutions and practices. It is skeptical of the human ability to radically reform society, arguing that drastic changes can destroy the wisdom of past generations. Liberals advocate for individual rights and liberties, the rule of law, private property, and tolerance. They believe that governments should protect these values to enable individuals to pursue personal goals without external interference. Socialism emphasizes collective ownership and equal distribution of basic goods. It seeks to overcome sources of inequality, including private ownership of the means of production, class systems, and hereditary privileges. Other strands of political philosophy include environmentalism, realism, idealism, consequentialism, perfectionism, nationalism, individualism, and communitarianism.

In political science, a political system means the form of political organization that can be observed, recognised or otherwise declared by a society or state.

It defines the process for making official government decisions. It usually comprizes the governmental legal and economic system, social and cultural system, and other state and government specific systems. However, this is a very simplified view of a much more complex system of categories involving the questions of who should have authority and what the government influence on its people and economy should be.

The United Nations (UN) is a global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the articulated mission of maintaining international peace and security, to develop friendly relations among states, to promote international cooperation, and to serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of states in achieving those goals.

The United Nations headquarters is located in New York City, with several other offices located in Geneva, Nairobi, Vienna, and The Hague. The UN comprises six principal organizations: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice, the Secretariat, and the Trusteeship Council which, together with several specialized agencies and related agencies, make up the United Nations System. There are in total 193 member states and 2 observer states.

A sovereign state is a state that has the highest authority over a territory. It is commonly understood that a sovereign state is independent. When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may also refer to a constituent country, or a dependent territory.

A sovereign state is required to have a permanent population, defined territory, a government not under another, and the capacity to interact with other sovereign states. In actual practice, recognition or non-recognition by other states plays an important role in determining the status of a country. Unrecognized states often have difficulty engaging in diplomatic relations with other sovereign states.

A nation is a type of social organization where a collective identity, a national identity, has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population, such as language, history, ethnicity, culture, territory, or society. Some nations are constructed around ethnicity (see ethnic nationalism) while others are bound by political constitutions (see civic nationalism).

A nation is generally more overtly political than an ethnic group. Benedict Anderson defines a nation as "an imagined political community […] imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion", while Anthony D. Smith defines nations as cultural-political communities that have become conscious of their autonomy, unity and particular interests. Black's Law Dictionary also defines nation as a community of people inhabiting a defined territory and organized under an independent government. Thus, nation can be synonymous with state or country. Indeed, according to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, what distinguishes nations from other forms of collective identity, like ethnicity, is this very relationship with the state.

A nation state, or nation-state, is a political entity in which the state (a centralized political organization ruling over a population within a territory) and the nation (a community based on a common identity) are broadly or ideally congruent. "Nation state" is a more precise concept than "country" or "state", since a country or a state does not need to have a predominant national or ethnic group.

A nation, sometimes used in the sense of a common ethnicity, may include a diaspora or refugees who live outside the nation-state; some dispersed nations (such as the Roma nation, for example) do not have a state where that ethnicity predominates. In a more general sense, a nation-state is simply a large, politically sovereign country or administrative territory. A nation-state may or may not be contrasted with:

A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.

In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a means by which organizational policies are enforced, as well as a mechanism for determining policy. In many countries, the government has a kind of constitution, a statement of its governing principles and philosophy.