How states actually behave — the international-relations background verification proposals live inside.
You know how systems behave. This primer is the minimum IR needed to reason about treaties between adversaries — no history of Westphalia, no UN org charts. Seven short sections and a self-check. Anything with a + opens into detail: click it. Everything here is load-bearing for the rest of the track.
There is no root authority
One fact generates most of international relations. Internalize it and the rest of this primer — and this course — follows.
Inside a country, agreements work because an enforcement layer sits above the parties. Sign a contract, break it, get sued: courts and police exist, and neither party runs them. Between countries, no such layer exists. There is no world government, no global police, no court with compulsory jurisdiction over unwilling great powers. IR calls this condition anarchy — not chaos, just the absence of a ruler.
The systems analogy
The international system is a distributed network of self-interested agents with no trusted third party and no admin. Nobody has root. Agreements between states are protocols that any node can silently stop following. There is no runtime that executes a treaty and no exception handler when one party defects — only whatever detection and response the other parties built for themselves.
Optional pre-work companion to The Verification Game — a branching-timeline interactive on why verification is the load-bearing element of an AI treaty. Suggested time: 15–20 minutes.