Answer: The modern world-system is structured politically as an interstate system – a system of competing and allying states. Political Scientists commonly call this the international system, and it is the main focus of the field of International Relations. Some of these states are much more powerful than others, but the main organizational feature of the world political system is that it is multicentric. There is, as yet, no world state. Rather there is a system of states. This is a fundamentally important feature of the modern system and of most earlier regional world-systems as well.
