ABSTRACT
Widespread sense of insecurity and vulnerability is palpable in many settings, but it is felt in relation to inherited concepts of political practice and analysis as well as to the daily reports of physical terrors, counterterrors and looming catastrophes. People may know that the boundaries of any modern state are always more complicated than the clean lines of most cartographic representations; any sociological, or economic, or cultural, or legal analysis can tell us this. The general problem is that claims about the international work as if they are claims about the world as such, or at least about the totality of humanity that is to be found all over the world. This problem finds two primary expressions, both involving quite profound contradictions, and adding up to the way international relations cannot in fact be a synonym for world politics. The modern game of war and peace among states is enabled by an exceptionalism at the edge of the states system.
