Renegade Regimes and Global Order

Extract

Renegade Regimes by Miroslav Nincic is a must read study of theory and practice regarding a central twenty-first century security challenge. Nincic shows that political science has much to offer policymakers by providing facts and analysis that explains deviant regime behavior and how that can guide effective policymaking. Renegade Regimes shows that conventional theories of international relations are, alone, insufficient to understanding this primary security problem. Nincic moves beyond the American terminology of “rogue states” arguing that the state is more appropriately thought of as the agent of a regime, which represents the norms that follow from the definition of state interests. Three particular attributes are essential in this context: (1) characteristic methods of rule; (2) characteristic policy goals, and (3) characteristic principles of legitimacy (p. 13). In understanding the relationship between norms and regimes, Nincic asserts that there are limitations to traditional realist assumptions about the content of ideas in the international system—in that there has been a clear agreement that certain norms have become internationalized and thus broadly accepted. To Nincic, power hierarchy matters as the normative content of international relations is established by norm-setters who are at the apex of regional or global hierarchy (p. 21).