The meanings of the word "rogue" - as in, "rogue nation" - have developed in three stages. When people first began talking about "rogues," in the middle of the sixteenth century, they had in mind people who might now be called unemployed or homeless: a part of the population which didn't have a fixed place to live or source of income, and thus moved from place to place looking for ways to survive. "Rogue" was a legal category of people whom the government worried about and wanted to control; soon, it also came to mean not only homeless/unemployed, but also "a dishonest, unprincipled person." People used the word as a term of abuse for servants "you rogue!" and also as an affectionate term for children, as we might now say, "you cute little rascal, you."

In the mid-nineteenth century, these social meanings were transferred to ways of talking about plants and animals. Darwin referred to the inferior plants among a group of seedlings as "rogues"; elephants expelled from the herd were "rogues," which in this case also implyed that they had become savage or dangerous; horses, which like elephants were also working animals, were called "rogues" when they avoided the work of hunting or racing.

By the mid-twentieth century, "rogue" took on more abstract meanings. In various quantitative fields like physics, it could mean a result or phenomenon which stood out as very different from the rest for no clear reason. This definition was soon extended to mean one of a group of things which stood out as inexplicably defective or faulty. Finally, it also came to mean something which is irresponsible or undisciplined, something which should be controlled but is not.

Currently, the term "rogue nations" usually points to countries the speaker feels diverge from "normal" behavior in ways which the speaker's own country doesn't like, but can't control for instance, by supporting or sympathizing with acts of terrorism against the ordinary populations of other countries. Do any of these other, older meanings help us think about political situations? Sometimes, these nations may have been dispossessed or displaced, like the rogues of the sixteenth century; these rogues were feared by those who had something because they had nothing. Maybe the word also carries the implication that a rogue is in some way believed to be of a lesser order: it describes beggars, servants, children and working animals. Most recently, we have seen the meanings of the word change quickly from inexplicable difference to differences which shouldn't be allowed to exist; we can also wonder if this vocabulary includes enough tolerance for different religious and political systems.

Many people and countries want there to be collective standards for how we can act, which everyone agrees to and abides by. The down-side in seeing non-compliant groups or countries as "rogues" might be in insisting that their motives can't be explained or understood; or that their rights and interests are inherently less meaningful than those of others.

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