Insiders and Outsiders in US Security Discourse: The Rogue States Case

The division of international society into binary oppositions, such as ‘failed’ and ‘successful’ states, ‘superiority’ and ‘inferiority’, or the ‘civilized self’ and the ‘barbaric other’ has a long history in international relations. After the end of the Cold War, which made the East-West divide obsolete, a key emerging ‘new’ security discourse continued to draw upon the division of states into two opposing camps, focusing in particular on differentiating between ‘law-abiding’ regimes and those that remain ‘outside the family’ of civilized nations. Frequently labelled as ‘rogue states’ or ‘renegade regimes’, these ‘outsiders’ have been argued to pose a risk to the stability of the international system precisely through their engagement in activities outside the norms of ‘civilized’ society and international law. This paper investigates the ‘Rogue States Case’ in US security discourse in the post-Cold War era. It illustrates how the US discourse on the rogue states threat emphasizes that deviant behavior establishes uncertainty per se as the main threat to US national security, because rogues states are not only less constrained through non-compliance with fundamental behavioral norms, but they are also unpredictable and irrational. The paper argues that the oppressive nature of a regime - rather than engagement in international terrorist activities or the potential acquisition of weapons of mass destruction - lies at the core of the interpretation by key actors in US security policy-making that rogue states constitute a risk to the stability of the international system.