Disputed territories

Territories whose status is contested, recorded so that a map can say so.

Usage

disputed_territories

Format

A tibble with 22 rows:

territory: Common name of the territory.
iso3c: ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code where one exists, else NA. Most disputed territories have none, which is why they cannot appear in an iso3c-keyed dataset at all.
administered_by: The party in de facto control, or NA where none is. An ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code where that party has one – see the note on codes below.
claimed_by: Semicolon-separated claimants, coded as for administered_by.
status: One of "un_member", "un_observer", "partially_recognised", "administered" or "claimed".
note: One sentence of context, including why the row is here.

Details

This table records that a dispute exists and who the parties are. It does not adjudicate, rank claims, or imply that any claim is better founded than another. Where it says "administered by" it means de facto control as reported by the mapping sources the package already uses (Natural Earth), not recognition, legitimacy or endorsement.

What reads these columns

Nothing in the package does. The internal layer and note builders behind world_map(disputes = ) and dispute_policy() key on iso3c alone, and no verb filters on the parties. administered_by and claimed_by are here for your own filtering – "show me everything Morocco administers", "drop the territories with more than one claimant" – and are documented precisely so that such a filter is writable. Their contents are validated at build time against the placeholder list below.

The codes in `administered_by` and `claimed_by`

Mostly ISO 3166-1 alpha-3, so they join the iso3c spine directly – but not entirely, and the exceptions are the point of the table. Six parties here are entities ISO assigns no code to, and they are written with a mnemonic placeholder instead: ABK (Abkhazia), CYP-N (Northern Cyprus), OST (South Ossetia), PMR (Transnistria), SAH (the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) and SOL (Somaliland).

Five of them – ABK, CYP-N, OST, PMR and SOL – appear in administered_by for the like-named territory, which has no ISO code of its own: the entity administers itself and ISO codes neither. SAH is the exception and worth knowing about: it appears only as a claimant, of Western Sahara, which ISO does code (ESH) and which MAR administers.

None of the six are ISO codes, so none will resolve through convert_country() or any other iso3c lookup. Filter them out with %in% country_codes()$iso3c if you need a strictly ISO-keyed column.

Scope

A documented subset, not the roughly 188 disputed areas the EU's data-visualisation guidance counts. The selection criterion is mechanical and checkable: territories that appear as a distinct unit or a contested boundary in Natural Earth at 1:110m or 1:50m, and have an ISO 3166-1 code, a widely-used user-assigned code, or a standard "disputed" label in ISO, UN M49 or World Bank practice. That criterion requires nobody to judge the merits.

Examples

disputed_territories[, c("territory", "iso3c", "status")]
#> # A tibble: 22 × 3
#>    territory         iso3c status              
#>    <chr>             <chr> <chr>               
#>  1 Western Sahara    ESH   administered        
#>  2 Kosovo            XKX   partially_recognised
#>  3 Palestine         PSE   un_observer         
#>  4 Taiwan            TWN   partially_recognised
#>  5 Crimea            NA    administered        
#>  6 Northern Cyprus   NA    partially_recognised
#>  7 Abkhazia          NA    partially_recognised
#>  8 South Ossetia     NA    partially_recognised
#>  9 Jammu and Kashmir NA    claimed             
#> 10 Aksai Chin        NA    administered        
#> # ℹ 12 more rows