Three decades ago T. Skocpol and her associates invited social scientists to bring back in the state into the research agenda. However, this return of the state required to treat state and war on equal footing. Political dimension (state) could not exist and function without military (war) and vice versa. In order to define state, you have to define war.
To defend this approach is difficult in the light of increasing debates about globalisation and emergence of “cultural turn”, which clearly ontologically and epistemologically favour neither state, neither war. Post-Cold war era is marked by confusion of conceptual debates about nature and character of war. While the field of state theories also is in flux. It seems that this state of conceptual confusion in both fields is interrelated and must be approached at the same time. Otherwise, by losing the meaning of war we may lose meaning of the state.
