ABSTRACT
Increasingly social scientists are exercising caution when discussing the state and the nation. It has been conventional in the last thirty years to lump the two together, referring to "nation-states" as if that were the universal form of sovereign polity. Today, however, as the tenuousness of national integration is acknowledged to be more than merely transitory and as the role of coercion is being taken more seriously in analyses of political order, we are chary of too facile a usage of nation-state. For in reality many sovereign polities in the international system are states without concommitant nations. That is, they behave as independent political actors because they possess coherent state structures, not because they contain a cohesive body of citizens bound together by shared experiences, political values and trust. As we come to give the statist dimensions of polities their due, we devote more research energies to understanding the character and repercussions of those core elements of any state: the civilian bureaucracy and the armed bureaucracies composed of the police and the military.
