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Apolity is a group of people with a collective identity, who are organized by some form ofpolitical,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 acorporation, and in the case of a federal country, the government that exists at both its federal level and the level of its subdividedregions. A polity may have various forms, such as arepublic administered by anelected representative, arealm of a hereditarymonarch, an incorporated city managed by an appointed mayor, and many others.
The preeminent or most fundamental polities today are generally understood to befederal andunitary states made up ofWestphalian states andnation-states, commonly referred to ascountries, which, in the case of the former, may governfederated 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).
Ingeopolitics, a polity can manifest in different forms such as a province, a nation, astate, anempire, aninternational organization, apolitical organization or another identifiable, resource-manipulating organizational structure. A polity like a state does not need to be asovereign unit. The preeminent polities today areWestphalian states andnation-states, commonly referred to as countries. Note that the termcountry may refer to a variety of types of polity: usually to asovereign state, but also to astate with limited recognition, aconstituent country of a sovereign state, or adependent 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 subordinatecivil, regional, andlocal 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 historicalSteppe Empires originating from theEurasian Steppe was the most prominent example of non-sedentary polities. These polities differ from states andpolitical 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 inIraqi Kurdistan are parts of their own separate and distinct polity. However, they are also members of the sovereign state ofIraq 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 theconceptualisation of polities, in particular of states. Hobbes considered notions of the state and thebody politic inLeviathan, 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.
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