The State

The state is often assumed to be the starting point of analysis in the traditional study of Politics. This dominance has been challenged in recent years by empirical phenomena (and subsequent theoretical debates) around issues such as globalization and the perceived move away from government to governance. Some scholars have argued that there has been too little focus upon the state and that it needs to be brought back in to our analysis (Skocpol, 1985). Given the importance of the state for understanding our discipline(s), even if in our later work we come to reject its centrality, we need to begin with an understanding of what it is and how it operates. We do this by asking questions such as: what role does the state play in society? Is the state powerful? How can we understand what happens within and between states? We give an overview here of some of the different ways in which political scientists/analysts and IR scholars have sought to address these questions.