Q.Distinguish between sovereignty and legitimacy as features that define the modern state.

Sovereignty and legitimacy are related but distinct ideas, and modern states typically rest on both at once, even though a state could, in principle, possess one without the other.

Sovereignty refers to a state's undisputed political rule over a given territory -- the fact that within its borders, a state's authority is not subordinate to, or overridden by, any other political power. A sovereign state has, by definition, the final say over what happens within its territory, backed by a legal system and, ultimately, by the capacity to use military or police force to enforce its rule. Sovereignty, importantly, is a factual and legal claim about who holds ultimate authority over a territory; it does not, by itself, say anything about whether people living under that authority accept it as right, or whether they had any say in choosing it. Early sovereign states, ruled by monarchs, were often fully sovereign in this sense while granting their subjects no political rights at all.

Legitimacy is a different kind of claim altogether: it concerns whether a political order is regarded, by the people living under it, as just and valid -- a matter of belief and acceptance rather than of legal or military fact. Power backed by legitimacy is what sociologists call authority: rule that people comply with because they consider it fair and rightful, rather than purely because they fear the consequences of disobedience. A government can hold sovereignty over a territory without being regarded as legitimate by significant sections of the population it rules -- a situation that tends to be unstable, since compliance secured only through force is far more fragile than compliance secured through genuine acceptance. …