Challenging Global Power Dynamics: The Case for a New International Relations Lexicon

United States President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Gastonia Municipal Airport, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026, in Gastonia, NC [Matt Kelley/AP Photo]. Injustice extends beyond people and states, reaching deeply into words and concepts. This is particularly clear in international relations, where power frequently overshadows wisdom. Those who control money, trade, technology, and resources also attempt to dictate the concepts through which we understand the world. Naming and framing can manufacture enemies, discredit dissenters, justify war, and advance political interests, ultimately shaping the image of reality.

The extensive United States machinery of concept production has created loaded, unjust terms that American power has imposed globally. To address this imbalance in the realm of ideas, a new category is proposed: the pernicious state. While any state can cause harm, a pernicious state has a historical structure built entirely around causing harm, transforming it from an occasional reaction into a sustained, imperial way of life with global reach.

International relations have always been chaotic and driven by power, but insidious concepts engineered by the powerful are often more dangerous than physical violence. These terms sanitise and legitimise the actions of superpowers while criminalising their victims. Western-centric political lexicons, such as the term 'rogue state' in United States foreign policy, are both theoretically flawed and politically aggressive. To counter a system that focuses scrutiny on weaker states while ignoring superpower violence, the 'pernicious state' concept offers a necessary analytical tool. A pernicious state does not merely break global rules; it rewrites them to institutionalise its own impunity, scaling its harm with its overall power.

Pernicious power operates through economic, cultural, legal, and military mechanisms that extract wealth from foreign societies while avoiding accountability. Economically, these states use asymmetrical trade agreements and predatory lending to paralyse developing economies. Culturally, they invent civilising myths and deploy powerful media to make hegemony appear benevolent. Legally, they advocate for a 'rules-based international order' while writing the rules to maintain their own immunity, often refusing to ratify treaties like the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

When soft power falls short, pernicious states turn to covert coups, insurgencies, or unilateral sanctions and embargoes that restrict access to food and medicine. This model echoes classical European imperialism, seen in colonial Britain's extraction and 'divide and rule' strategies during the partition of India, and colonial France's cultural suppression and the use of the Indigenous Code and the CFA franc. The modern United States represents an evolution of this framework, maintaining global military bases, dominating international banking networks, and practising jurisdictional exceptionalism.

The concept of the pernicious state addresses a significant blind spot in international relations discourse, challenging the persistent focus on the Global South while overlooking the institutionalised violence of global superpowers. Ultimately, states should be judged by the material consequences of their foreign policies on human lives beyond their borders, moving past the moral superiority behind which global powers conceal their actions.