Sovereign Nation-State as the Primary Actor in IR

Every time you fly out of Mumbai, an immigration officer checks a passport that only one entity on earth could have issued you — the Republic of India. No company, no NGO, no international body can do that. Only a sovereign state creates citizens, polices a border, and speaks in its own name at the United Nations. That single fact is this whole topic: in international relations, the state is not one actor among many, it is the actor every other actor is measured against.

In two minutes

A sovereign nation-state remains the primary actor in IR because it alone combines a defined population, a fixed territory, an effective government and legal sovereignty into one entity that international law recognises as an equal of every other state.

The rest of this chapter

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