maps showing post-Soviet states?

Thanks to Gilles Leduc, Greg Snow, Thomas Adams, Barry 
Rowlingson, and Michael Sumner for their replies.  For the archives, in 
case someone else might find this in the archives, I will record here 
two solutions to my problem.


       1.  Michael's reply was the simplest, especially since it worked 
with "map" adding "add=TRUE" and "col" to the plot:

map(xlim=c(10, 90), ylim=c(30, 60))
library(raster)
ct <- getData("countries")
plot(subset(ct, NAME %in% c("Azerbaijan", "Uzbekistan", "Tajikistan",
                             "Turkmenistan", "Croatia")),
             add=TRUE, col='red')


       2.  Before I saw Michael's reply, I had solved the problem with 
much greater effort:  (1) I downloaded a zip file for each country from 
"www.diva-gis.org/datadown", as suggested by Gilles. (2) Unzipping 
produced folders with names like "..\TWN_adm" and files with names 
beginning "TWN_adm0", "TWN_adm1", and "TWN_adm2" and extensions bdf, 
prj, sbn, sbx, shp, and shx.  I could then get what I wanted with code 
like the following:


Taiwan0 <- readShapeSpatial("..\TWN_adm0")
map(xlim=c(100, 150), ylim=c(10, 30))
plot(Taiwan0, add=TRUE, col='blue', lwd=3, fill=FALSE)


       Again, thanks for the replies.

An example:

library(raster)
ct <- getData("countries")
plot(subset(ct, NAME %in% c("Azerbaijan", "Uzbekistan", "Tajikistan",
"Turkmenistan", "Croatia"))




On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 9:09 AM, Michael Sumner <mdsumner at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 7:56 AM, Thomas Adams <tea3rd at gmail.com> wrote:

Spencer,

Maybe I'm not sure what you're asking but here
http://www.gadm.org/version1
are current shapefiles by country. The highlighting (selection) canals  be
done in GRASS GIS, QGIS, GMT

  raster::getData can read this. See here http://www.gadm.org/ and

library(raster)
?getData

Tom


On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 2:29 PM, Spencer Graves <
spencer.graves at prodsyse.com>
wrote:

       What would you suggest I do to create a world map highlighting
Taiwan and post-Soviet states like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, and Croatia?


       The region argument in maps::map won't recognize any of these, and
my literature search identified hundreds of packages with some spatial /
geographical / mapping content.


       Thanks,
       Spencer Graves

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Michael Sumner
Software and Database Engineer
Australian Antarctic Division
Hobart, Australia
e-mail: mdsumner at gmail.com