'polities' is a correct and usable word in written English.
It is a plural form of the noun 'polity', which refers to a form or system of government or organized society, often in a political context. Example: The polities in Europe vary greatly, from democratic to authoritarian systems.
But many of the ostensibly more liberal Asian polities also display the symptoms, especially where prickly nationalists are in charge.
The borders fixed by European mapmakers created unwieldy polities that had to struggle through painful and often violent processes of nation-building.
They are fighting a lonely battle against a rich, corrupt and entrenched political class, braving occasional death threats to try to clean up one of the world's filthiest polities.
In many ways, France and America clash so often not because they are so irreconcilably different, but because they are so alike.The modern French and American polities may have evolved quite differently, notably where the role of the state is concerned, but both emerged as highly codified, anti-clerical, secular republics.
As Benedict Anderson, a political scientist, put it, such polities are "imagined communities" in which each person feels a bond with millions of anonymous fellow-citizens.
True, Aceh's secession might lead to a more general unravelling of Indonesia (see article), and Africa's fragile polities might crack up completely, but maybe that, in time, would all be for the better.The trouble with fissionMaybe.
Such regimes are successful in the sense that they manage, as long as they last, to make people do what they are told; but once they fall, such polities can shatter into a thousand pieces.Beyond good and evilNor is there anything simple or Manichean about the standoff between the state on the one hand and its would-be wreckers on the other.
The Vatican reacted sceptically to Israel's creation in 1948 and the two polities exchanged ambassadors only in 1994; even now, some of the details governing Catholic properties and religious orders in the Holy Land have yet to be settled.
Some are community-minded folks who think smaller polities do better at serving their own needs.
The jihadists have moved into these wrecked polities with a calculated savagery intended to stir sectarian hatred and establish themselves as protectors of the Sunnis.In 2015 America and its allies will be confronted time and again by the dilemma they faced in Mesopotamia in 2014.
Hatred and extremism fester in closed polities, whereas the internet tends to strengthen the tolerant and open-minded.
