Having discussed the main limitations of current approaches in theorizing international organizations, this chapter goes on to investigate their core assumptions about the state. These are the notions that the state can be analogized to the ‘natural’ person of domestic law and that it forms an opaque and closed-off unitary actor. This chapter goes on to explain how this image may inadvertently distort how international organizations are theorized – from how we are to understand the relationship with their members to more technical questions of customary international law. Concluding this chapter, I suggest that theorizing international organizations should proceed from an altogether different premise. This is the idea the state itself is an artificial entity rather than a somehow naturally irreducible one.