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Rogue States |
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Rogue States After the evil empire was dispatched and America’s global power ascendance was assured, world order was still disturbed by jumped-up nation-states that breached international norms of behavior, outrageously and always egregiously. From Washington’s perspective, these were the nation-states that played by no known rules of world order, pursuing at best idiosyncratic designs. These states disregarded Washington’s predominant military might and followed autarkic rather than collegial, consensual, or respectful policy trajectories. First in the Clinton administration and then in the George W. Bush administration, Washington began calling these outlaw, anomic, unsavory, and troublesome places “rogues.” Rogue states, in other words, are the primary policy worries of the post-Cold War era; rogues collectively and individually have replaced the Soviet Union as the repositories of evil.
Contemporaneously, and sometimes much earlier, commentators and scholars employed the appellation “rogue” to describe those polities that oppose the dominant powers in the international system, especially the United States, show aggressiveness, operate in a manner that troubles world order, or flout international law. Possessors of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and sponsors of terrorism obviously are rogues because they refrain from obeying international standards. Rogues are “crazy” states. Their actions are unpredictable and hence roguish. Earlier, before the Cold War had ended, “rogue” was used more narrowly and precisely to describe a nasty nation-state that refused to treat its inhabitants decently—in accord with the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Program on Intrastate Conflict held a series of conferences at the Kennedy School with several dozen scholars, diplomats, and NGO practitioners in order to seek fuller, measurable, and more comprehensive definitions of rogue states. The group asked: In the first decade of the twenty-first century, what are the characteristics of those dozen or so nation-states that are truly odious and truly troublesome—those that are operate beyond the international normative pale? From a human rights perspective, and presuming value in an orderly world, these are the worst of the worst. They breach a variety of “civilized” norms. They offend regional and global power structures. What distinguishes them from strong states, failed states, weak states, and from the globe’s leading powers?
A book, edited by Robert I. Rotberg, is being prepared.
WPF Policy Brief 3: Identifying Rogue States: Issues
of Policy and Action
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