Doctrinal controversies and the disputed international status of Kosovo and Palestine suggest that it is difficult for us international lawyers to know with any certainty when a new State has emerged in the international community. The contention here is that we should look to systems theory thinking—specifically complexity theory—to make sense of the law on statehood. Systems theory directs us to conceptualize the State in terms of patterns of communications adopted by law and politics actors and institutions and applied to subjects. Complexity tells us that these patterns develop without any central controller or guiding hand and that they exist only as a consequence of the framing of law and politics communications by a third party observer. The argument developed in this article is that these insights can provide the intellectual “scaffold” around which we can build our model of the international law on statehood.