ABSTRACT
I explore the visual politics of the state. The term state is often used interchangeably with other similar terms, such as country, nation or nation-state. Conventionally, scholars examine the “state” within both historical and functional contexts. Historically, the state seems to have emerged around the time of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which was a series of treaties ending the Thirty Years War and embedding the modern nation-state as an entity with authority within a bounded territory that borders other states. This authority is hierarchical. It is not, in other words, overlapping with other authorities within the same bounded space. Of course, the process of the “state” becoming the main unit of international politics is a bit messier than the conventional understanding would tell us (see Ashworth 2014), and including a period of consolidation and struggle that happened both before and after the Peace of Westphalia.
