State as a Community of Persons

Take away every building, every border pillar and every minister in India, and one thing still cannot be removed without destroying the State itself: the people. A State without land can be recovered, as Kuwait was in 1991. A State without a government can be reconstituted overnight, as several countries have shown after a coup. A State without people is not a State at all — it is empty territory. That is the whole of this topic in one sentence.

In two minutes

The State is, before anything else, a community of human beings — its population is the one element none of the other three (territory, government, sovereignty) can substitute for or exist without.

The rest of this chapter

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