Methods to Their Madness: Understanding the Behavior of Rogue Regimes

Abstract

Despite the urgency of rogue states for U.S. policy, scholars have not developed an understanding regarding their definition and emergence. My dissertation seeks to resuscitate rogue states as a subject of inquiry for both the policy community and political science.

I make the case for roguery as a concept within International Relations (IR) by identifying the puzzle it poses, that is, why do countries of a marginal military and economic stature so vigorously resist what IR scholars have termed state socialization? I delineate and expand upon the particular practices inherent to anti-socialization, or aversion, documenting how their perpetuation among marginal actors is both out of sync with globally conceived notions of appropriateness and seemingly unnecessary among the ever-adapting community of surviving autocracies.

Upon establishing a population of cases based on these criterion and situating rogue states within the wider conventional wisdom on authoritarian survival, I develop a path-dependent conceptual framework to account for roguery's onset and perpetuation. My explanation focuses primarily on the worldviews of political entrepreneurs during state-building, distinguishing "progressive worldviews"-in which a state comes to over time envision for itself a place within the international community-from "reactive" ones-which, resulting from a belief that the world outside has left the state beggared relative to its neighbors and vulnerable to outside attack, facilitates a siege mentality, necessitating what I call differentiation-a belief that survival entails internalizing and routinizing practices that further distinguish, rather than connect, the state to the outside world. The success or failure of the entrepreneurial establishment in identifying an ideationally receptive coercer-namely the military-security establishment-willing to form a coalition based upon said establishment's vision, neutralize those who would oppose it, and ultimately commit itself to the practices deemed to further differentiation, marks a critical juncture at which states do or do not become rogue. The entrenchment of roguery, moreover, corresponds to the accrual of benefits among this coalition over time, various domestic and international survival strategies learned along the way, and a number of structural intervening factors such as geo-strategic orientation.

I test this theory through five detailed case studies.