A state -any state – has the enormous and terrifying power to take an individual’s life. The state can send people to war, impose capital punishment, let the police officers shoot and kill, etc. such an extreme form of power has to be legitimated in some way. There needs to be something that makes this arrangement legitimate in our eyes.
In the pre-modern era, the state’s power to kill was legitimated by God. The king, the tsar, the archduke or whomever was the God-given ruler who was doing God’s will and that will was not to be questioned.
The XVIIIth century shattered religion and God couldn’t legitimate something as huge as the state killing people any longer. This was when the nation-state arose and offered a new contract: the state retains its exceptional right to kill and in return offers to look out for the citizens’ well-being.
When soldiers go to die in Iraq and say “We are going there to defend our freedoms”, this doesn’t mean that Iraq is threatening their freedom of speech or if conscience directly. It means that they are fulfilling their part of the bargain where the state guarantees them these freedoms and they are prepared to die when the state needs it.
Clarissa's Blog 
I would disagree that the state has any “right” to kill. It has the authority, granted through the people, to kill in defense of the state (the people). Also, the reason the government has the ability to kill is because in order to protect our rights, it has to have a monopoly on force. Having an entity that consists of humans that has a monopoly on force is of course asking for trouble, and thus there are all sorts of checks-and-balances that have been put into place and even then, we still have problems.
There isn’t really an alternative to having a government and form of state though unless one prefers anarchy.
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