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.
Evil and the coinage of a concept in international relations
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.
The term deserves a place in international relations. A pernicious state does not merely violate the rules of global order; it rewrites them to institutionalise its own impunity. Crucially, perniciousness scales with capability. While mainstream discourse often presents fragile and weaker states as the principal sources of global instability, the capacity to cause harm internationally is inseparable from a state’s overall power. The greater that power, the greater its capacity for perniciousness; superpowers can therefore inflict harm on a scale unavailable to smaller states.
Anatomy of pernicious power
Pernicious power rarely relies solely on crude or impulsive invasions. Instead, it operates through a quieter network of economic, cultural, legal and military mechanisms that drain foreign societies while deflecting accountability.
Economically, the pernicious state treats the global market as an engine of extraction. Through asymmetrical trade agreements and predatory lending practices, it can paralyse developing economies, leaving them structurally dependent and unable to build sovereign domestic industries. This process is often enabled by close ties between state power and transnational corporate conglomerates.
To obscure this economic predation, pernicious power deploys its cultural apparatus. It invents “civilising myths”, casting interventions in the noble language of democracy, development or human rights. Beneath this facade, local cultures are marginalised and foreign populations portrayed as inherently backward or dangerous. A powerful media apparatus then helps present superpower hegemony as both natural and benevolent.
Legally, the pernicious state is a zealous advocate of a “rules-based international order” – provided that it writes the rules and remains immune from them. Pernicious superpowers exploit legal loopholes to shield themselves from accountability and cloak systemic injustice in legality. They may refuse to ratify treaties such as the Rome Statute, block independent global investigations, and outsource destabilisation to corrupt local proxies.
When soft power reaches its limits, pernicious states pivot to less visible forms of violence. Rather than bear the political costs of overt military occupation, they may orchestrate covert coups, fund insurgencies, or impose collective punishment. Through sweeping unilateral sanctions and embargoes, they can restrict access to medicine and food, pushing civilian populations towards political submission. Overt warfare and direct invasion are never entirely discarded; they remain the ultimate option on a diverse menu of coercion.
This operational blueprint is not entirely new. The strategies deployed by contemporary superpowers – particularly the US – can be understood as digital and modernised extensions of classical European imperialism.
Colonial Britain perfected extraction through institutional fracturing. Through corporate monopolies such as the East India Company, it drained enormous wealth from the Indian subcontinent while devastating domestic industries, including the textile sector. At the same time, London weaponised religious and ethnic divisions through “divide and rule” strategies, leaving behind deeply fractured borders and political legacies – such as those associated with the partition of India – that continue to fuel geopolitical tensions.
Colonial France pursued a path of aggressive cultural erasure and legal apartheid. Under the banner of its “civilising mission”, the French state systematically suppressed indigenous languages and religions. Through the Indigenous Code, it denied native populations basic rights and exposed them to forced labour and arbitrary detention while protecting French settlers. Even in the postcolonial era, Paris retained considerable financial leverage in parts of Africa through monetary arrangements such as the CFA franc.
The modern US represents how classical European imperialism has evolved. It has largely abandoned formal territorial colonies while maintaining an extensive global network of military bases and commanding major arteries of global finance. Recent US political discourse and practice have exacerbated perniciousness in international relations, even towards allies, let alone adversaries.
By dominating international banking networks, Washington can exert immense pressure on foreign economies. Its unilateral sanctions can function as instruments of collective punishment, damaging healthcare systems and impoverishing populations in states that refuse to comply with US demands. The US also practises a form of jurisdictional exceptionalism, demanding international compliance from others while declining to become a party to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Rome Statute.
The concept of the pernicious state is intended to address an imbalance in international relations discourse, particularly in how it assesses ideological and erratic foreign policies, including those associated with highly dogmatic and mediocre leadership in recent US history. For too long, Western-centric discourse has focused on the structural weaknesses of the Global South while overlooking the institutionalised violence and intentional perniciousness of global superpowers.
States should therefore be judged not primarily by the vibrancy of their domestic elections or the nobility of their rhetoric, but by the material consequences of their foreign policy for human lives beyond their borders. Whether one examines the legal traps of colonial France, the geopolitical fractures left by Britain, or the financial chokeholds and military bravado of the contemporary US, the same logic is at work: the theft of human sovereignty concealed behind a mask of moral superiority.
Perniciousness: The dark side of power
A pernicious state is not yet a formal classification within mainstream international relations theory. But the broader question remains: what does it mean for a state to be fundamentally injurious to the international system? Many states in the Global South are undeniably tyrannical or pernicious within their own borders. Powerful states, however, can exercise international repression on a civilisational scale, driven by doctrines of exceptionalism and backed by militaries capable of projecting power across the world. They can undermine regional stability by sponsoring insurgencies, trafficking in arms and backing militant proxies. They can treat international law with indifference, acting simultaneously as judge, jury and executioner, while mobilising a vast military-industrial system optimised for power and profit at the expense of global peace.
If concepts are instruments of power, then we should examine not only the labels imposed on weaker states, but also the structures of harm created by the powerful. The question is not merely which states violate the international order. It is also which states possess the power to shape that order, evade its restraints and make their own impunity part of its design. That is the question the concept of the pernicious state is intended to force us to ask.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
