State In International Relations Essay

A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust, and when
Can Man its shattered splendour renovate
Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate? —Lord Byron, from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”
Introduction
The term International Relations is synonymous with Inter-State Relations. The state has long been regarded as the most significant actor on the world stage, the basic ‘unit’ of global politics.
It is a historical institution; that emerged in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe as a system of centralised rule that succeeded in subordinating all other institutions and groups, temporal and spiritual. The Peace of Westphalia (1648)

It implies a focus on the relations between territorial states in contrast to processes going on within state territorial boundaries. Three geographical assumptions made regarding states are a) they are fixed units of sovereign space, b) domestic/foreign polarity and c) societies contained in states.
The merging of the state with a clearly bounded territory is the geographical essence of the field of international relations. The intellectual taxonomy of the field of political science that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War led to the emergence of international and domestic as separate areas of specialisation. The ‘international’ (inter-state) was theorised as separate and distinct from the national/domestic, requiring a more homogeneous and uniform conception of the state as an actor from that adopted by students of ‘domestic’ political and restricted to studying relations between territorial states (Carr, 1939). There was a distinction drawn between the form of political order within the state characterised by hierarchy compared to that between states guided by anarchy. In International Relations theory, the second aspect has been