[2] Bull was born in Sydney, Australia, where he attended Fort Street High School.
He went on to study history and philosophy at the University of Sydney, where he was strongly influenced by the philosopher John Anderson.
[1] Two years later, in 1967, he was appointed to a professorship of international relations at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.
His requirements for an entity to be called a state are that it must claim sovereignty over (i) a group of people (ii) a defined territory, and that it must have a government.
He finally concludes that, despite the existence of possible alternative forms of organization, the states system is our best chance of achieving order in world politics.