This chapter argues that state concepts and state theories are performative: they partially constitute the object that they describe, and become means through which the state order is justified, materialized, and indeed organized. As such, state theory and state concept are indispensable to any actually existing state order, and have strong determinative consequences for the intellectual construction of international law as legal order and a system of relations between and across state orders. The chapter demonstrates the organizing force of state concepts on the conceptualization of the nature of the order of international law, and also the way in which jus naturae et jus gentium became essential to the theorization and reproduction of the distinctive kind of public power we associate with the modern state concept.