ABSTRACT
The claim that international politics is anarchical is almost universally embraced by IR theorists and practitioners (for an alternative view, see Chapter 7). This is in part because the myth of international anarchy seems so straightforwardly to describe what we know about international politics. First, the anarchy myth assumes that international politics is composed of sovereign nation-states and that these sovereign nation-states are beholden to no higher power. That is what it means to be sovereign-for a state to have absolute authority over its territory and people and to have independence internationally. In international theory, all states in international politics are assumed to be sovereign, even though there are debates about degrees and/or kinds of sovereignty (Jackson, 1990). And while some IR theorists consider sovereignty itself to be a myth (Bierstieker and Weber, 1996), most regard it as the primary fact of international political life.
