The exclusion and isolation of certain countries in international relations is often driven by concerns about their domestic politics, human rights violations, supporting terrorism, or engaging in illegal military activities. Iran and North Korea have combined all the above with nuclear threats, leading their states to be labelled as “Rogue States” in the post-Cold War.
A key reference in the International Relations (IR) literature that specifically discusses this concept is “Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Containment after the Cold War” by Robert S. Litwak, which discusses how the United States and its allies adopted policies aimed at containing states that were deemed outside the bounds of acceptable state behaviour.