The “standard” ISO 3166 short English names for those countries and regions which are in some cases controversial (e.g. refering Taiwan as “Province of China”), do not necessarily refer to nation-states (eg., Hong Kong and Macau) and should not be treated as such, and not all of them are commonly used in the world (eg., “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” for North Korea.)
ISO 3166 does not define the names of countries. This info comes from United Nations and represent UN's PoV of the world, miss out some countries such as Kosovo or Palestinian in the list.
When listing countries or other geographic areas in documentation, menus, mirror lists, or other contexts, it is important to introduce such lists as "Countries or Regions" so that an implied sovereignty claim is neither made nor denied to those regions.
Here are examples of how open source projects and technology companies deal with this "ISO 3166" problem: