Wolfgang Wagner Rehabilitation or Retribution ? “ Cultures of Control ” and Policies vis - à - vis Renegade States

The paper suggests a framework for analyzing democracies’ policies towards renegade states, i.e. states whose defining feature is regarded to be norm-breaking (e.g. Iran or North Korea). The paper argues that policies towards renegade states are heavily influenced by domestic cultures of control because the problem of recurrent violations of community norms as posed by renegade states to the international community is similar to the problem posed by criminals in domestic society. Thus, states with a retributive culture of control follow a confrontational policy towards renegade states, fed by a “criminology of the other” that is based on the assumption that certain criminals are simply evil and therefore intrinsically different from the rest of community. In contrast, states with a “penal-welfarist” or “rehabilitative” culture of control follow a more accomodationist policy, aiming at the resocialisation of the renegade into the community. The paper argues that a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is most promising: In-depth case studies can explore to what extent key concepts of cultures of control can be found in the discourse on renegade states. A quantitative analysis can take prison populations (i.e. the share of persons imprisoned) as an indicator for states’ culture of control and correlate them to measures of confrontational or accomodationist policies while controlling for confounding influences such as economic interests. Author’s contact details: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wagner Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Department of Political Science De Boelelaan 1081 NL-1081 HV Amsterdam The Netherlands