Sovereign state
What you should know about this indicator
- For the years until 1919, Correlates of War considers a country a sovereign state if it has a population of at least 500,000 people, and is diplomatically recognized by France and the United Kingdom.
- For the years after 1919, a country is considered a sovereign state if it either at any point was a member of the League of Nations or the United Nations, or had a population of at least 500,000 people and was diplomatically recognized by at least two major powers.
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data 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 Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
We use the state system membership from Correlates of War. We assign each country to a region based on the mapping (using COW codes):
- Americas: 2-165
- Europe: 200-399
- Africa: 402-626
- Middle East: 630-698
- Asia and Oceania: 700-999
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data 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 Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. 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 Our World in Data, 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 Correlates of War. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/sovereign-state-cow [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:
Correlates of War - State System Membership (2017) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Full citation
Correlates of War - State System Membership (2017) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Sovereign state” [dataset]. Correlates of War, “State System Membership v2016” [original data]. Retrieved September 8, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/sovereign-state-cow