Short answers, pulled from the story.
A state is a political entity that regulates society and the population within a definite territory, often referred to as the country itself with its administrative divisions. There is no academic consensus on the definition, but Max Weber's is the most commonly used, describing the state as a compulsory political organization that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
The earliest forms of states arose about 5,500 years ago. Charles Tilly traced states in the archaeological record as far back as 6000 BC, and the first known states were created in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes.
A state is a political unit with sovereignty over a given territory, possessing geographic boundaries, officials, and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. A nation is a cultural-political community concerned with political identity and cultural or historical factors, and it lacks those organizational characteristics.
Grains such as wheat, barley, rice, and corn could be stored for extended periods, making them ideal targets for taxation by rulers and theft by looters, which created a need for protection and strong governance. Mayshar and colleagues showed in 2020 that grain-cultivating societies developed hierarchical structures with tax-collecting elites, while societies relying on perishable root crops did not.
Charles Tilly argued that states resemble a form of organized crime and should be viewed as extortion rackets that sell protection from themselves. He defined states as coercion-wielding organizations and insisted that war is essential to state-making, holding that wars create states and states create wars.
A failed state, in David Samuels's words, occurs when sovereignty over claimed territory has collapsed or was never effectively held at all. Such states cannot fulfill basic functions like providing security, maintaining law and order, and delivering public services, a shortfall tied to state capacity.
The international community comprises around 200 sovereign states, the vast majority of which are represented in the United Nations. Since the late 19th century, virtually all of the world's inhabitable land has been divided into areas with more or less definite borders claimed by various states.