Imagine a political map of the world. It shows neatly drawn lines dividing the continents into colored shapes, each labeled with a name — France, Nigeria, India, Canada, Brazil, Japan. The lines look clean and natural, as if the land itself demanded them. But those lines are human constructions. They were drawn through war and diplomacy, colonization and independence movements, negotiation and force. Some were agreed upon centuries ago. Others have been contested within living memory. A few remain disputed today, with different governments and populations claiming the same territory under different flags.

Now ask a slightly different question about those same shapes on the map: what exactly are they? Most people would say they are "countries." But the word country is imprecise. Is it the land? The people? The government? The laws? The culture? A country like Canada includes people who speak different languages, hold different cultural traditions, practice different religions, and disagree deeply about political questions. The government of Canada is not the same thing as the Canadian people, who are not exactly the same thing as the Canadian nation, who live within a state that itself operates under a constitutional framework. These distinctions matter enormously in political life, even when they seem like academic word games.

This chapter is about the most fundamental building blocks of the political world: the concepts of the state, the nation, sovereignty, territory, borders, and political identity. These concepts form the basic vocabulary of international relations, comparative government, constitutional theory, and civic life. Before students can understand why countries go to war, why some governments are recognized and others are not, why minority groups sometimes seek independence, why international organizations operate the way they do, or why some communities do not have governments of their own at all, they need to understand what a state is, what a nation is, and what sovereignty means in both theory and practice.

The distinction between a state and a nation is one of the most important in political science, yet one that ordinary language constantly blurs. In everyday English, people use "state," "nation," "country," and "government" almost interchangeably. Political scientists use these words with more precision, and for good reason. A state is a political and legal entity defined by territory, population, government, and sovereignty. A nation is a cultural, ethnic, linguistic, or historical community that shares a sense of common identity. A country is a general term that may refer to either or both. A government is the set of institutions and officials who exercise authority within a state. These are not merely matters of vocabulary. They point to entirely different things in the political world, and confusing them leads to misunderstanding real political conflicts.

This chapter also explores sovereignty, one of the most foundational and contested concepts in political theory. Sovereignty is the claim to supreme authority within a defined territory. A sovereign state claims the right to make and enforce its own laws, to control its own borders, and to act in its own interests without being directed by any outside power. Sovereignty is the basis of the modern international system. It shapes how states interact with one another, how international law works, how the United Nations is organized, and why some political conflicts are so difficult to resolve. Yet sovereignty is also complicated. It can be contested from within and without. It can be exercised unjustly. It can conflict with human rights. And in an interconnected world, no state is fully sovereign in every practical sense.

The chapter also takes up the challenge of diversity within states. Most political states contain within their borders multiple national groups, ethnic communities, religious traditions, and linguistic populations. How governments manage this diversity — through federalism, minority rights, autonomy arrangements, integration, or suppression — is one of the great practical and moral challenges of modern governance. By the end of this chapter, students will have a clear, precise, and nuanced understanding of the most basic units of political life, equipped to read news about border disputes, independence movements, international recognition, refugee crises, and constitutional conflicts with the conceptual tools needed to think carefully about what is actually at stake.

The state is the central organizing concept of modern political life. Almost everything studied in government, international relations, comparative politics, and public policy revolves around states in one way or another. Yet many students come to this subject with only a vague sense of what a state actually is. In everyday language, "state" sometimes means a country, sometimes means a province or subdivision within a country (as in the fifty states of the United States), and sometimes is used interchangeably with "government." In political science, the term is used in a more precise way, and understanding that precision is essential.

Political scientists often rely on a definition drawn from the study of international law, comparative politics, and political philosophy. The most commonly cited framework comes from the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, an international legal agreement that identifies four criteria a political entity must meet to qualify as a state. These four criteria remain the standard starting point for understanding what a state is, and each deserves careful examination.

One of the most influential descriptions of the state comes from the German sociologist Max Weber, writing in the early twentieth century. Weber defined the state as a political organization that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. This means that the state — and only the state — is recognized as having the right to use coercion, including imprisonment, military force, and law enforcement, in the ordinary course of political life.

Weber's definition highlights something crucial: what makes the state's use of force different from ordinary violence is not just that the state is powerful, but that its authority is considered legitimate — meaning that most people accept that the state has the right to make and enforce rules, even when they disagree with specific rules. This legitimacy may rest on democratic elections, constitutional tradition, historical authority, or some combination. When a state loses legitimacy — when its citizens no longer accept that it has the right to govern — its ability to function is severely compromised, even if it retains physical power.

Not every political entity that claims to be a state operates effectively. Some governments lose control of significant portions of their claimed territory. Others collapse entirely during civil war or revolution. When a state is unable to provide basic security, govern its territory, enforce law, or deliver essential services, scholars and policymakers sometimes describe it as a "fragile" or "failed" state. Examples have included Somalia in the 1990s and early 2000s, parts of Libya after 2011, and regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo over multiple decades. In these situations, the formal legal status of statehood — recognized borders, a seat at the United Nations — remains in place even when the practical capacity to govern has collapsed.

This illustrates that statehood is not just a factual matter of control but also a legal and political status that can persist even when reality is very different. The existence of fragile and failed states poses serious challenges for international politics: they can become havens for criminal organizations or armed groups, they often generate humanitarian crises, and they raise difficult questions about when and whether outside actors may intervene and on what authority.

Four words are often used as synonyms in everyday speech — nation, country, government, and regime — but in political science, each refers to something distinct. Using them interchangeably creates confusion and can obscure important differences in political life. This section defines each term carefully and explains why the distinctions matter.

A nation is a community of people who share a sense of common identity based on some combination of shared history, language, culture, tradition, religion, ancestry, or political experience. The key word is sense: a nation exists when a group of people perceives itself as a distinct and coherent community. Nations do not require states, governments, or even territory to exist. They are, at their core, communities of identity and belonging.

Government refers to the specific institutions, offices, officials, and processes through which political authority is exercised. Governments change: elections replace one government with another, coups install new ruling groups, constitutions are rewritten. But when the government changes, the state does not necessarily change. The French Fifth Republic has had many governments — different prime ministers, different coalitions, different presidents — while remaining the same state.

A regime refers to the system of rules, norms, and institutional arrangements that determine how political power is organized and exercised within a state. Regime change occurs when the fundamental rules of the political system change — for example, when a democracy collapses into authoritarian rule, or when an authoritarian state undergoes democratization. Regime change is more profound than a government change but does not necessarily mean the state itself dissolves. Germany in 1933 and 1945 experienced regime change — from Weimar democracy to Nazi dictatorship, and back to democracy — while the state entity persisted in modified form.

No concept is more central to the modern state system than sovereignty. It is the doctrine that holds together the international order and defines the legal equality of states. It is also one of the most contested, complicated, and frequently misunderstood concepts in political life. Students who understand sovereignty well are equipped to think clearly about international relations, constitutional theory, human rights, and the limits of political authority.

Sovereignty, at its most basic, means supreme authority within a defined territory. A sovereign state is one that recognizes no higher political authority over itself within its own domain. It makes its own laws, enforces them through its own institutions, defends its territory with its own forces, and represents itself in its dealings with other states. Sovereignty is the claim to be the ultimate source of political authority within a particular space.

The concept has two distinct dimensions that political scientists sometimes call internal and external sovereignty. Internal sovereignty refers to the state's authority over its own population and territory — its supremacy over all other sources of political power within the state. External sovereignty refers to the state's independence from outside control — the claim that no other state or foreign authority has the right to direct its internal affairs.

The modern concept of sovereignty developed in Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, during a period of intense conflict between political and religious authority, between rising monarchies and older feudal structures. The concept was systematized most influentially by the French political theorist Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, who argued that effective government required a final, undivided source of authority — a sovereign — who could make law without being bound by the law.

The Peace of Westphalia, concluded in 1648 after the devastating Thirty Years' War, is often cited as the foundational moment of the modern state system. The treaties ending that conflict established principles — including respect for the territorial integrity of states and the right of rulers to determine the religion of their territories — that came to be associated with the idea that states are the primary actors in international politics. This framework is sometimes called the Westphalian system, and its core principles remain embedded in contemporary international law and the United Nations Charter.

It is worth noting, however, that the historical significance of Westphalia is sometimes overstated. Many parts of the world — in Asia, Africa, and the Americas — were not parties to these European agreements and were later subjected to colonial rule that violated any principle of sovereign equality. The Westphalian system was, for much of its history, a system for European states; its extension to the rest of the world came gradually through decolonization in the twentieth century.

Political scientists distinguish between de jure sovereignty and de facto sovereignty. De jure sovereignty (from the Latin meaning "by right" or "by law") refers to the legal recognition of a state's authority — the formal acknowledgment by other states and by international law that a particular government is the legitimate authority in a particular territory. De facto sovereignty (meaning "in fact" or "in practice") refers to the actual, practical exercise of authority on the ground.

In ideal cases, de jure and de facto sovereignty align: the government that is legally recognized is also the government that actually controls the territory. But the two can come apart in important ways. A government may be legally recognized but have lost effective control of significant parts of its territory to rebel groups — the Syrian government in the 2010s controlled only part of Syrian territory while retaining its formal international status. Conversely, a government may exercise effective control over a territory without being recognized by much of the international community — the government of Taiwan has governed its island effectively for decades but is recognized diplomatically by only a small number of states.

States do not exist in the abstract. They exist in physical space, over people, and in relation to other states. Territory, borders, and diplomatic recognition are the three concrete elements that give sovereignty its tangible expression in the real world.

Territory as Political Claim. Territory is more than just land. It is a political claim — an assertion that a particular government has the right and the capacity to exercise authority over a particular geographic area. The territory claimed by a state includes not only the land within its borders but typically the airspace above that land and, for coastal states, a zone of ocean extending from the shoreline. Maritime territorial claims are governed by international agreements, most notably the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which establishes rules for territorial waters, exclusive economic zones, and the high seas. These maritime boundaries are frequently contested, particularly in regions like the South China Sea and the Arctic Ocean.

How Borders Are Created. Borders are the lines that divide one state's territory from another. Most borders are the result of historical conquest, colonial imposition, diplomatic bargaining among European powers, treaties that resolved military conflicts, or administrative decisions made by distant empires. The borders of most African states were drawn by European colonial powers at the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference, with little regard for the distribution of African ethnic groups, linguistic communities, or political traditions. Many of those same borders persist today, long after independence, creating states that contain multiple competing national or ethnic communities within a single political boundary.

Border Disputes. Border disputes — disagreements between states about where one state's territory ends and another's begins — are among the most common sources of international conflict. The dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region has persisted since partition in 1947. The dispute between China and several Southeast Asian nations over islands and maritime rights in the South China Sea involves overlapping claims of enormous strategic and economic significance. Border disputes are difficult to resolve in part because territory is bound up with national identity, historical memory, economic interest, military strategy, and political pride in ways that make compromise painful and politically costly.

Diplomatic Recognition. One of the most important and often misunderstood aspects of statehood is diplomatic recognition — the formal acknowledgment by one state that another political entity is a sovereign state with which it is willing to enter into legal relations. Recognition is both a legal act and a political one. When states recognize a government or a new state, they are making a legal determination and also making a political statement about their interests, alliances, and values. The United States was one of the first countries to recognize Israel when it declared independence in 1948; many Arab states did not recognize Israel for decades afterward. Recognition matters because it affects a state's ability to participate in international organizations, sign treaties, access international financial institutions, and defend its interests in international law.

Among the most powerful forces in modern politics is nationalism — the belief that people who share a common national identity should form their own political community, or at least that the nation should be the primary unit of political loyalty. National identity shapes how people understand their political obligations, who they consider their compatriots, what they are willing to sacrifice for, and what kind of government they consider legitimate.

National identity is a form of collective self-understanding — a sense of belonging to a community defined by shared characteristics that distinguish it from other communities. These characteristics vary enormously across national traditions. For some nations, the defining element is language: French national identity has long been closely tied to the French language, which is why France has developed policies actively promoting French in public life. For others, the defining element is religion: the idea of Poland as a Catholic nation has been central to Polish national identity through periods of partition and occupation. For others, shared history, ancestry, cultural traditions, or political experience play the central role.

National identity is communicated and reproduced through education, media, public ceremonies, literature, holidays, and monuments. The stories that nations tell about themselves — their founding myths, their heroes, their great struggles, their defining moments — shape how citizens understand who they are and what their political community stands for. These stories are always selective: they emphasize certain episodes and marginalize others. Who gets to define the national story, and whose experiences are included or excluded, is itself a political question.

Political scientists often distinguish between two broad conceptions of nationalism, which differ in how they define membership in the national community.

Civic nationalism defines the nation by shared political values, legal citizenship, and commitment to common institutions. In a civic nationalist framework, anyone who accepts the laws and values of the political community can be a full member of the nation, regardless of their ancestry, religion, language, or ethnic background. Civic nationalism tends to be more inclusive: it can accommodate immigration and diversity because membership is based on commitment to shared political principles rather than inherited characteristics. The United States has often been described as exemplifying civic nationalism, given its tradition of defining American identity in terms of constitutional values and legal citizenship — though American history also includes deeply exclusionary practices that complicate this picture.

Ethnic nationalism defines the nation by descent, ancestry, blood, or inherited cultural characteristics. In an ethnic nationalist framework, membership in the nation is determined by who your parents were and what culture you were born into, not merely by your political choices or legal status. Ethnic nationalism tends to draw sharper boundaries around the national community: it may define certain groups as permanently foreign, may resist immigration or cultural mixing, and may link political legitimacy to ethnic homogeneity. Ethnic nationalism has been a force for both political mobilization and for exclusion, discrimination, and, in extreme cases, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

In practice, most national identities combine civic and ethnic elements in complex and shifting ways, and the balance between them is a matter of ongoing political debate. Germany has historically defined German identity in partly ethnic terms but has substantially reformed its citizenship laws to become more inclusive. France has a strong civic nationalist tradition but has also generated political conflicts over cultural assimilation that reveal the limits of purely civic definitions.

The ideal of the nation-state — a state whose population constitutes a single, unified nation — has been enormously influential in modern politics. The idea that every nation deserves its own state, and that every state should correspond to a nation, has driven independence movements, decolonization struggles, and redrawings of the political map across multiple centuries.

In practice, the nation-state ideal has never been fully achieved, and there are good reasons to doubt it ever could be. Populations are not neatly sorted into homogeneous national units; they are mixed, distributed, and mobile. The borders that would need to perfectly separate one nation from another simply do not exist. Attempts to create ethnic or national homogeneity have often involved violence — the expulsion of minorities, forced assimilation, and in the worst cases, genocide. The great catastrophes of the twentieth century — including the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and mass atrocities in Rwanda — were all connected in various ways to the dangerous logic of ethnic nationalism pushed to extremes.

Most successful modern states are not nation-states in the pure sense but are instead multiethnic or multinational states that manage internal diversity through constitutional structures, rights protections, and political accommodation rather than through ethnic homogeneity.

The vast majority of the world's states contain within their borders more than one ethnic group, linguistic community, religious tradition, or cultural population. Managing this diversity — ensuring that all groups have political voice, that no group is excluded or oppressed, and that the state remains governable and legitimate — is one of the central challenges of political governance.

A multinational state is one in which two or more distinct national communities, each with a sense of its own identity and political aspirations, coexist within the same political boundaries. Examples include Canada (Anglophone and Francophone communities, plus Indigenous nations), Belgium (Dutch-speaking Flemish and French-speaking Walloon communities), and the United Kingdom (English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish communities, some of which have significant independence movements).

A multiethnic state is one in which multiple ethnic groups coexist, though they may not each constitute distinct nations with strong political aspirations. Ethnic diversity does not automatically generate political conflict; many multiethnic states are stable and relatively harmonious. But ethnicity can become politically salient when ethnic groups are economically marginalized, when political power is distributed unequally along ethnic lines, or when political entrepreneurs mobilize ethnic identity for electoral gain.

Governments have developed a range of strategies for managing diversity within multinational and multiethnic states. These strategies differ in their assumptions about what diversity means for political community and what kind of unity is possible or desirable.

Assimilation is the strategy of integrating diverse groups into a common national identity and cultural framework. Assimilationist policies typically involve a common language of public life, a unified national education curriculum, and expectations that immigrants and minorities will adopt the practices and values of the dominant culture. France has historically pursued a strongly assimilationist approach. Assimilation can produce political cohesion, but it can also generate resentment among communities whose identities are devalued or suppressed.

Multiculturalism is the strategy of acknowledging and accommodating cultural diversity within a single political framework. Multicultural policies may include recognition of minority languages in public life, support for cultural institutions, and accommodation of religious practices. Canada, Australia, and many Western European countries have pursued multicultural policies to varying degrees. Multiculturalism can promote inclusion, but it also generates debates about whether cultural accommodation weakens national cohesion.

Federalism is the strategy of dividing political authority between a central government and regional governments in ways that give distinct communities substantial control over their own affairs. Switzerland organizes its diverse linguistic communities through a federal system giving cantons significant powers. India uses federalism partly to accommodate the country's extraordinary linguistic diversity. Power-sharing arrangements — sometimes called consociational democracy — are formal mechanisms designed to ensure that major ethnic, religious, or national communities all have representation in government. Lebanon's political system formally distributes government positions among its major religious communities.

Not all strategies for managing diversity succeed. Political scientists have identified several conditions that make ethnic or national conflict more likely: when political institutions systematically exclude certain groups from power, when economic resources are distributed along ethnic lines, when historical injustices are unaddressed, or when political leaders mobilize ethnicity for electoral advantage.

The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s is one of the most studied examples of a multinational state fracturing into violent conflict. The federal state of Yugoslavia contained Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians, and other communities. During the Cold War, the federal structure held under Tito's leadership. After Tito's death and amid economic pressures and political liberalization in the late 1980s, political leaders in different republics mobilized nationalist sentiment, the federal government weakened, and the state broke apart — often violently — into its component parts. The resulting wars produced widespread atrocities and generated some of the most important debates of the 1990s about when the international community is obligated to intervene in the internal affairs of a state.

One of the most politically charged features of the contemporary world is the existence of stateless nations — communities of people with a strong shared national identity who lack a state of their own. Stateless nations may aspire to political independence, seek autonomy within an existing state, or simply seek recognition of their distinct identity within the political framework of a larger society. Their existence reveals the gap between the nation-state ideal and political reality, and their struggles are among the most persistent sources of international conflict.

The Kurds are one of the world's largest ethnic groups without their own state. Numbering approximately thirty to forty million people, Kurds are dispersed across southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria. Kurds speak their own language, maintain distinct cultural traditions, and have a strong sense of shared national identity. In the aftermath of World War I, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres promised the Kurds a homeland, but the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which recognized the new Turkish Republic, did not fulfill this promise. Kurds have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and military force in different countries at different times.

The Palestinians are an Arab people who inhabited the territory of Mandatory Palestine under British rule and who have sought political self-determination since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The Palestinian Authority governs portions of the West Bank, and Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, but neither is a fully recognized state under international law. The question of Palestinian statehood is one of the most contested political issues in the world. A majority of UN member states now recognize Palestinian statehood in some form, but the creation of a Palestinian state that is internationally recognized, territorially defined, and practically viable remains unresolved.

The Tibetans are a people with a distinct culture, language, religion (Tibetan Buddhism), and historical tradition who had their own political structure before Chinese forces established control over Tibet in 1950. The Tibetan government-in-exile operates from India but has no territorial authority and is not recognized as a legitimate government by any state.

The Sahrawi people of Western Sahara have been seeking self-determination since Spain withdrew from its colonial territory in 1975 and Morocco claimed the territory. A UN-sponsored ceasefire has been in place since 1991, but a promised referendum on self-determination has never been held.

The right of peoples to self-determination — to choose their own political status and form of government — is recognized in the United Nations Charter and in international human rights law. The principle was enormously influential in the decolonization era, as it provided a moral and legal basis for colonial peoples to demand independence from European empires.

But self-determination creates a fundamental tension with another foundational principle of international order: the territorial integrity of existing states. If every group with a distinct national identity has the right to its own state, then existing states could be endlessly divided and subdivided. International law has tried to navigate this tension by suggesting that self-determination does not necessarily mean full independence but can be fulfilled through meaningful autonomy, cultural rights, and political participation within an existing state. Full independence is recognized as a remedy when peoples face persistent denial of their rights, colonial rule, or systematic exclusion from political participation. But this framework leaves many cases in an uncertain middle ground.

The contemporary world contains numerous territories whose sovereignty is contested. Taiwan exercises all the functions of an independent state — it has its own constitution, government, military, currency, and foreign policy — but its international status is ambiguous. The People's Republic of China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and insists that Taiwan is not a separate state. Most countries, including the United States, maintain unofficial relations with Taiwan rather than formal diplomatic recognition.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 after years of conflict and a period of international administration. It is recognized by over one hundred states but is not recognized by Serbia, Russia, China, or the United Nations as a whole. Abkhazia and South Ossetia broke away from Georgia with Russian military support in 2008 and are recognized by Russia and a small number of other states but are regarded by most of the international community as Georgian territory. These cases illustrate that contested sovereignty is not merely a theoretical possibility but a persistent feature of international politics.

The concept of sovereignty was developed in an era when states were more self-contained — when communication across borders was slow and expensive, when economic interdependence was limited, and when threats to security were primarily military threats from neighboring states. The contemporary world is fundamentally different. Economies are deeply integrated. Information, capital, people, and goods move across borders at enormous speed and volume. Environmental changes in one country affect populations in others. Diseases spread globally within days or weeks. Terrorist networks and criminal organizations operate across borders without regard for sovereign claims. In this context, the traditional concept of sovereignty has been significantly complicated, though not eliminated.

Economic Interdependence and Sovereignty. Trade and financial integration have created a world in which no state can be fully economically self-sufficient. Even large and powerful states depend on imports of key resources, goods, and technologies; on export markets for their products; and on international financial systems for credit and investment. Membership in international economic institutions — the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Union — involves accepting rules and constraints on domestic economic policy in exchange for market access, financial support, and institutional voice. These constraints are voluntarily accepted, but in practice the economic costs of exit are significant enough that they constitute real limits on sovereign discretion.

International Law and Sovereignty. The growth of international law — including human rights law, humanitarian law, environmental law, and trade law — has created a framework of rules that states are expected to follow even when those rules restrict their internal choices. When states sign treaties, they accept legal obligations that bind their domestic behavior. International law is generally understood to require state consent, which preserves an important element of sovereignty. But once legal obligations are accepted, they constrain sovereign discretion, and the emergence of legal norms around human rights has created expectations that apply even to states that have not formally consented to specific treaty obligations.

Global Problems and Collective Action. Many of the most important challenges facing contemporary societies cannot be addressed by any single state acting alone. Climate change, pandemic disease, nuclear nonproliferation, cybersecurity, and transnational criminal networks all require coordinated international action. No single state can solve the problem of global warming by reducing its own emissions alone, if other major emitters continue. These collective action problems create strong incentives for international cooperation but are difficult to sustain because they require states to subordinate some element of their immediate self-interest to the collective good.

The most morally charged challenge to traditional sovereignty comes from the field of human rights. The claim that all human beings, regardless of where they live or what government rules them, possess certain fundamental rights creates a standard against which state behavior can be judged that is independent of any particular state's own laws or decisions.

When states violate the rights of their own citizens, the traditional sovereignty principle says that other states have no right to interfere. But the human rights movement, accelerating after World War II and the Holocaust, has insisted that some violations are so severe that the international community has both the right and the duty to respond. This tension was partially addressed by the development of the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) doctrine in the early twenty-first century, which holds that when a state is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens from mass atrocities — genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity — the international community has a responsibility to act. R2P was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2005 but remains controversial in practice, because it creates an exception to the principle of non-interference that powerful states can potentially exploit for political purposes.

The result is a world in which sovereignty remains the foundational principle of international organization but is increasingly layered with international norms, institutional obligations, economic interdependencies, and shared problems that require collective governance. This tension — between the sovereign state and the demands of an interdependent world — is one of the defining challenges of contemporary politics and one that this textbook will return to repeatedly in later chapters.