Polity

For other uses, see Polity (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with Policy.

A polity is a group of people with a collective identity, who are organized by some form of political, institutionalized, social relations, and have a capacity to mobilize resources.^[1] It is the unit or entity of a political community or body politic.

A polity can be any group of people organized for governance, such as by the board of a corporation, and in the case of a federal country, the government that exists at both its federal level and the level of its subdivided regions. A polity may have various forms, such as a republic administered by an elected representative, a realm of a hereditary monarch, an incorporated city managed by an appointed mayor, and many others.

The preeminent or most fundamental polities today are generally understood to be federal and unitary states made up of Westphalian states and nation-states, commonly referred to as countries, which, in the case of the former, may govern federated states varyingly referred to as states, provinces, regions, cantons, lands, governorates, oblasts, emirates, or countries (in the narrow definition). These form the basis of international law and organizations, such the United Nations (itself the governing structure of a global polity).

Overview

Frontispiece of Leviathan, 1690

In geopolitics, a polity can manifest in different forms such as a province, a nation, a state, an empire, an international organization, a political organization or another identifiable, resource-manipulating organizational structure. A polity like a state does not need to be a sovereign unit. The preeminent polities today are Westphalian states and nation-states, commonly referred to as countries. Note that the term country may refer to a variety of types of polity: usually to a sovereign state, but also to a state with limited recognition, a constituent country of a sovereign state, or a dependent territory.^[2][3][4]

A polity may encapsulate a multitude of organizations. Many of these form (or are involved in) the administrative apparatus of contemporary nation states: such as their subordinate civil, regional, and local government authorities.^[5][6] Polities may be non-sedentary populations (migratory or dispossessed or disconnected from their associated lands): they do not need to be in control of any geographic area and there have been examples of polities that have not controlled the resources of one fixed geographic area. The government of the historical Steppe Empires originating from the Eurasian Steppe was the most prominent example of non-sedentary polities. These polities differ from states and political entity polities because of their lack of fixed, defined territory. Empires also differ from states in that their territories are not statically defined or permanently fixed and consequently that their body politic was also dynamic and fluid. It is useful then to think of a polity as a political community.

A polity can also be defined either as a faction within a larger (usually state) entity or at different times as the entity itself. For example, Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan are parts of their own separate and distinct polity. However, they are also members of the sovereign state of Iraq which is itself a polity, albeit one which is much less specific and, therefore, much less cohesive. Consequently, it is possible for an individual to belong to more than one polity at a time.

Thomas Hobbes was a highly significant figure in the conceptualisation of polities, in particular of states. Hobbes considered notions of the state and the body politic in Leviathan, his most notable work.^[7]

Polities do not necessarily need to be managed by governments, civil management apparatus claiming broad jurisdiction over citizens and lands. A corporation, for instance, is capable of marshalling resources, has a governance structure, legal rights and exclusive jurisdiction over internal decision making. An ethnic community within a country (or a coast to coast entity) may be a polity if they have sufficient organization and sufficiently cohesive or common interests that can be furthered by such organization.

See also

• Politics portal

• Kokutai
• Nation
• Politeia
• Political system