In the structure of the value returned by the getMap function, it appears that column "NAME" stores the name of an area in the map while "SOVEREIGNT" is the name of the corresponding sovereign state.
Follow this code to extract the unique values in both columns:
library(rworldmap)
world_map <- getMap()
areas <- levels(world_map[["NAME"]])
sovereign_states <- levels(world_map[["SOVEREIGNT"]])