How many countries are there in the world?

It is the simplest question in geography, and the one without a single answer. The number of countries in the world is not something you measure, the way you measure the height of a mountain: it is the result of a convention. And conventions change depending on who is counting, and why.

Here are the figures you will run into, what each one actually covers, and which to use when.

193: the member states of the UN

This is the most rigorous figure, and the easiest to verify. 193 states are members of the United Nations. Each has a vote in the General Assembly, a flag outside the New York headquarters, and international recognition that nobody disputes.

The number moves very slowly. The most recent arrival is South Sudan, admitted on 14 July 2011, a few days after independence from Sudan. Before that: Montenegro in 2006, after separating from Serbia, and Timor-Leste in 2002. That same year Switzerland joined the UN — it had deliberately stayed out for more than half a century out of a tradition of neutrality, while hosting a good share of the UN's agencies in Geneva.

If your question is “how many sovereign states does the world collectively recognise?”, 193 is the best answer.

195: adding the two observers

Two entities hold the status of non-member observer state at the UN: they sit, they speak, they take part in debates, but they do not vote in the General Assembly.

• The Holy See (commonly called the Vatican). Vatican City State is the smallest country in the world — under half a square kilometre in the middle of Rome.
• Palestine, whose observer-state status was recognised by the General Assembly in November 2012.

193 + 2 = 195. This is the figure used by most textbooks, most atlases and most geography games, GeoG included. It has the advantage of being stable, sourced, and of taking no side in any recognition dispute.

197, 200, 204… : the partially recognised states

Beyond 195 you enter contested territory. Several places function as states — a government, a defined territory, a permanent population, the capacity to enter into relations with other states, the four criteria of the 1933 Montevideo Convention — but are recognised only by part of the international community.

• Kosovo, unilaterally independent since 2008, recognised by around a hundred states but not by Serbia, Russia or China.
• Taiwan (the Republic of China), which has every attribute of a state, but whose diplomatic recognition has shrunk to a handful of countries, the People's Republic of China making exclusive recognition a condition of its own diplomatic relations.
• The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (Western Sahara), recognised by several dozen states and a member of the African Union, though its territory is overwhelmingly under Moroccan control.
• Entities recognised by one or two states, or by none at all: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland.

Depending on which you include, you land on 196, 197, 198… The figure 197, fairly widespread, usually means 195 plus Kosovo and Taiwan.

249: the ISO 3166 codes

If you have ever filled in an online form, you have met ISO 3166-1: the list of two-letter (FR, DE, JP) and three-letter (FRA, DEU, JPN) country codes. It holds roughly 249 entries, because it is not trying to list states at all: it lists areas that need a distinct postal, customs or computing code.

So it includes Greenland (an autonomous Danish territory), Puerto Rico (a US territory), New Caledonia and French Polynesia, Hong Kong and Macau (Chinese special administrative regions), Gibraltar, the Faroe Islands, the Isle of Man — and Antarctica, which belongs to nobody.

Conversely French Guiana has no separate code in most common usage: it is a French department, exactly like any department in mainland France.

Why FIFA counts 211 countries

Sport is the clearest illustration of how arbitrary the count is. FIFA recognises 211 national associations, because football organised itself well before decolonisation and kept its original structures: the United Kingdom fields four teams — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — since those were the federations that codified the game in the nineteenth century. Add territories such as Tahiti, the Faroe Islands and Gibraltar.

The International Olympic Committee counts 206, with its own conventions: Puerto Rico parades separately from the United States, Hong Kong separately from China, and Taiwan under the name “Chinese Taipei”.

So which figure should you use?

• In an essay, an article, a quiz: 195, spelled out as “193 UN members and 2 observer states”. It is the safest formulation, and it shows you know why the number is what it is.
• For a strictly legal argument: 193.
• For software: ISO 3166-1, without trying to settle the political question — that is precisely the point of the standard.
• If someone insists on one final number: just ask whether they count Kosovo. The conversation immediately gets more interesting.

GeoG uses the 195 countries of the UN list extended to its observers. It is the compromise most atlases settle on: broad enough to leave out nothing indisputable, strict enough to stay verifiable.

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