Pernicious states: Towards a new grammar of international relations

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 sustaine...