Territory
As several essays here point out, the contemporary international system is generally traced to the treaties of Westphalia in the 1640s. The ideal envisaged by that Westphalian model was to coordinate states and territories, making each state, whether monarchy, principality, or republic, the sole sovereign authority in the territory to which it lay claim. This territorialization of power attempted to normalize a system of mutually recognized sovereign territorial states; it became the standard that European states subsequently maintained as they expanded globally. The Westphalian model also imagined that the international system would maintain itself through a coordinated system of international law, treaties, and diplomatic exchanges.
The point in all of this, of course, is that international political practice today demands that a sovereign entity be located and bounded. Governments in exile are not sovereign. Indeterminate spaces like that occupied by the Palestinian Authority are not sovereign territories,
SOURCE: Sovereignty and the Study of States © 2009 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, University Press
John Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity: The New International Relations (New York: Routledge, 1998); Robert H. Jackson, Quasi- States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002); Amartya Sen, Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002); David Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Oxford: Polity Press, 2004).