Introduction to the Problem of the State and Instability in the South

Abstract

The concept of the state has been under-researched in international relations, despite the dominance of state-centric realism as the conventional orthodoxy. Together with the attendant notion of sovereignty, the state, defined in terms of an abstraction and employed as a heuristic device, has been posited as the starting point of enquiry. Consequently, as international events rendered this practice increasingly untenable, the basic assumptions of the discipline were opened to criticism from without and self-reflection from within. However, whilst theories of interdependence and transnationalism abounded and the concerns of foreign policy analysis and political economy attained respectability within the discipline, the need for an extensive explication of the concept of the state became more pronounced.