From James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: The state is a hegemonic imposition upon a domain (a forest or city) to make it _legible_ (measurable and understandable by a third party)

My interpretation: the state is a framework created by a group of individuals, in a similar sense that we all have frameworks for how we navigate our world and local communities. The difference, however, is that their framework is essentially applied to a domain that they're not embedded in. Doing so creates a mentality of "us" and "other", whether its the local community, or the state that thinks its locals are "others" that need to be managed and any deviations from its expectations are self reinforcing to apply their own framework more strongly.