In Derrida’s reading, then, ‘the most roguish of rogue states are those that circulate and make use of a concept like “rogue state” [through] language, rhetoric, [and] juridical discourse’ (link, p. 96).
While the Bush administration posits the states of the ‘axis of evil’ as having sacrificed their claims to subjectivity, Derrida maintains that the ‘most violent of rogue states are those that have ignored and continue to violate the very international law they claim to champion … in whose name they speak and in whose name they go to war’ (ibid).
Here, the worst possible sin is not enabling the limitless threat of non-state violence, but the hypocrisy inherent in ‘the mastery of war in the name of a commitment to the promotion and enablement of life’ (link). In the war on terror, all states are rogue.
This is a context in which the United States was allowed to declare a ‘war’ against terror, only to pronounce that those captured in the course of said conflict ‘do not qualify to be prisoners of war as per the Geneva Convention’ (link, p. 15), and - as such - the rogue state signifier is no longer meaningful.
