Pernicious states: Towards a new grammar of international relations

Senior Research Fellow, The Global Institute for Strategic Research (GISR), Hamad Bin Khalifa University.

Injustice extends not only to people and states, but also to words and concepts. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in international relations, where power often prevails over wisdom and prudence. Those who control money, trade, technology and resources also seek to control the concepts through which the world is understood. Naming and framing can define enemies, discredit dissenters, create pretexts for war and aggression, burnish one’s own image and advance political interests. In short, concepts manufacture the image of reality.

The vast US machinery of concept production has generated an array of loaded and unjust terms that American power has then helped impose on the world. There is, of course, a vast difference between the ability of powerful states to produce and circulate such concepts and the capacity of weaker states to do the same. In an effort to bring greater justice to this unequal terrain of ideas, this piece proposes a different category: the pernicious state.

Every state, of course, can cause harm. But when a state’s historical structure is itself built around causing harm, perniciousness ceases to be an occasional response to necessity and becomes a sustained way of life. For that reason, the pernicious state is often gargantuan and imperial, with arms extending across the world.

International relations have never been a realm of gentle diplomacy. They have always been chaotic, violent, power-driven and bloody. Human history is marked by invasions, mass casualties and devastating conflicts waged by powers thousands of miles from the theatres of destruction. Yet more insidious than physical violence are the concepts engineered by the powerful to sanitise and legitimise their own conduct while incriminating and smearing the victims of their perniciousness.

A Western-centric political and academic lexicon has produced an array of categories used to classify and stigmatise states, while terms such as “rogue state” have become particularly embedded in United States foreign policy discourse. Ironically, these Western-minted terms are as theoretically flawed as they are politically aggressive.

We now inhabit a “post-fact” world in which truth is subordinated to narrative noise. In this arena, the aim is not to reflect reality but to secure global dominance. This effort is fuelled by right-wing think tanks churning out loaded, pejorative vocabulary weaponised for geopolitical supremacy.

By framing weaker states as existential evils that the West has a moral responsibility to curb, these concepts obscure a glaring blind spot: the structural violence of superpowers that may appear orderly at home while wreaking havoc abroad. If existing categories focus scrutiny on weaker states while overlooking the harms caused by the most powerful, then a different analytical concept is needed: the pernicious state.