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A polity is a group of people with a collective identity, who are organized by some form of political institutionalized , and have a capacity to mobilize resources.
A polity can be any group of people organized for governance, such as the board of a corporation, the government of a country, or the government of a country subdivision. A polity may have various forms, such as a republic administered by an elected representative, the realm of a hereditary monarch, and others.
The preeminent polities today are Westphalian states and , commonly referred to as countries.
A polity may encapsulate a multitude of organizations; many of these may form or are involved to the apparatus of contemporary states such as their subordinate civil and local government authorities. Black's Law Dictionary, 4th ed. (1968). West Publishing Co. Uricich v. Kolesar, 54 Ohio App. 309, 7 N.E. 2d 413. Polities do not need to be in control of any geographic areas, as they have not all controlled the resources of one fixed geographic area. The government of the historical Nomadic empire originating from the Eurasian Steppe was the most prominent example of non-Sedentism polities. These polities differ from states and polities because of their lack of a 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 of polities, in particular of states. Hobbes considered notions of the state and the body politic in Leviathan, his most notable work.Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan. Retrieved 2 January 2019.
Polities do not necessarily need to be governments. 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 coast to coast entity may be a polity if they have sufficient organization and cohesive interests that can be furthered by such organization.
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