Quoting dpatte via tz on Tuesday September 21, 2021:
Incorrect..Iso 3166 Ramallah is recognized in the State of Palestine. Sevastopol is recognized as a city as being in Ukraine. If you disagree politically, you can raise your issue with the iso.
ISO 3166 only encodes countries/territories, and subnational divisions of those entities that are supplied by the respective governments. Most of those subnational divisons are administrative regions like states and they are not necessarily comprehenseive. The standard does not specify boundaries for those subdivisions, and I don't think it would be decisive between conflicting claims (e.g. Western Sahara is encoded independently, but also as entities like Laayoune within Morocco) While ISO 3166 may do a heavy lift in this area and move the dispute over what is a country to another entity, it won't solve a lot of geographic coding problems. kim