ABSTRACT
People often talk about states as if they are real persons, yet few scholars accept the notion that states really possess the qualities that we normally associate with personhood. Indeed, while state behaviors and foreign policy choices are often dismissed as being “schizophrenic”, and in spite of growing interest among International Relations scholars in the field of political psychology, no theory of International Relations currently considers the implications of collective psychopathology for our understanding of states and the groups that constitute them. Whereas personality theory can be considered a “terra incognita” for International Relations scholars, behavioral ecologists and geographers have produced volumes of literature on group personality and its implications for understanding the social world. Within this context, this chapter asks what we may learn about states and about the social world more broadly, if we approached states holistically, as more than mere identities.
