Rizky Amelia
A senior international relations scholar has proposed introducing the analytical concept of the "pernicious state" into global political discourse, arguing that conventional academic and diplomatic vocabularies systematically obscure the structural violence and widespread harm inflicted across borders by major superpowers.
Writing in an analysis published on September 17, 2026, Ibrahim Arafat, a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Institute for Strategic Research (GISR) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, argued that the concepts used to interpret global affairs are disproportionately manufactured by the world's most powerful nations to serve their own geopolitical interests and insulate themselves from scrutiny.
Arafat highlighted that dominant states possessing vast financial, technological, and trade leverage actively control the naming and framing of international realities. By generating specific terminology, powerful actors are able to define adversaries, discredit dissenters, construct justifications for military aggression, and cultivate a benevolent self-image.
The scholar pointed out that Western-centric academic and political discourse has embedded loaded categories like "rogue state" into United States foreign policy. These Western-minted classifications, according to the analysis, are both theoretically flawed and politically aggressive, often crafted by right-wing think tanks to secure geopolitical dominance in a post-fact information environment where narratives frequently eclipse factual reality.
By categorizing weaker nations as existential moral threats requiring external intervention, existing concepts create a significant blind spot regarding the structural violence of superpowers that maintain domestic order while destabilizing foreign regions. To address this imbalance, Arafat presented the "pernicious state" as a necessary corrective category.
The analysis distinguished ordinary state harm from perniciousness, defining a pernicious state as one whose historical and institutional framework is fundamentally built around causing harm as an enduring, sustained way of life rather than an occasional response to necessity. Such states are typically imperial and expansive, extending their influence across the globe.
A key tenet of the proposed concept is that the capacity for international harm scales directly with a state's overall power. While mainstream discourse frequently frames fragile or smaller nations as the primary sources of global instability, superpowers possess the unique structural capability to inflict harm on an unprecedented, gargantuan scale.
According to Arafat, modern pernicious power rarely depends solely on impulsive or overt military invasions. Instead, it functions through an intricate, quieter network of economic, cultural, legal, and covert mechanisms designed to extract wealth and influence from foreign societies while deflecting legal and political accountability.
In the economic arena, pernicious states treat global markets as vehicles for extraction. Through asymmetric trade agreements and predatory lending mechanisms, they foster structural dependency across developing nations, effectively crippling the ability of these societies to cultivate sovereign domestic industries.
This economic subjugation is often facilitated through deep alignments between state institutions and transnational corporate conglomerates, ensuring that weaker nations remain tethered to foreign capital and incapable of self-determined economic development.
To obscure this economic predation, the analysis noted that pernicious powers deploy extensive cultural mechanisms. Foreign interventions are framed through "civilising myths," utilizing the language of democracy, human rights, and development to mask underlying exploitation while characterizing foreign populations as backward or dangerous.
A dominant media infrastructure further reinforces this dynamic by presenting superpower hegemony as natural, rational, and benevolent, thereby legitimizing foreign meddling to domestic and international audiences.
Legally, pernicious states frequently champion the idea of a "rules-based international order" while ensuring that they write the rules and remain insulated from their enforcement. Superpowers exploit legal loopholes and formalities to shield themselves from accountability, cloaking systemic global injustice in the veneer of legality.
Specific legal tactics highlighted in the analysis include refusing to ratify key international agreements such as the Rome Statute, obstructing independent global investigations, and outsourcing political destabilization to corrupt local proxies.
When diplomatic and soft power tools reach their limits, pernicious states resort to less visible forms of violence to evade the high political costs of direct military occupation. These strategies encompass orchestrating covert coups, financing armed insurgencies, and imposing sweeping unilateral sanctions that restrict access to basic necessities like food and medicine.
While indirect coercion and collective economic punishment are frequently prioritized, overt warfare and direct invasions are never abandoned entirely, remaining the ultimate coercive instrument in the superpower playbook.
Arafat contextualized contemporary superpower strategies—particularly those of the United States—as digitalized and modernized extensions of classical European imperialism. He cited the historical model of colonial Britain, which utilized corporate monopolies like the East India Company to dismantle local economies, such as the Indian textile sector, and siphon immense wealth through institutional fracturing.
Ultimately, the analysis concluded that introducing the concept of the pernicious state is essential for developing a fairer grammar of international relations, allowing analysts and the global public to properly identify and challenge the systemic harm generated by the world's most dominant powers.
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