Ken Rodman

Education

• Ph.D. in Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1983
• B.A. in Politics, Brandeis University, 1976

Areas of Expertise

• Business-government relations in foreign policy
• Economic sanctions
• U.S. foreign policy
• The United Nations
• Nuclear weapons proliferation
• General international relations
• International criminal justice and conflict resolution

Personal Information

Professor Ken Rodman is the William R. Cotter Distinguished Teaching Professor of Government at Colby College, where he has taught since 1989. Ken was the first director of Colby’s interdisciplinary International (now Global) Studies Program and the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights. He is the author of two books: Sanctity versus Sovereignty: The United States and the Nationalization of Natural Resources in the Third World (Columbia University Press, 1988) and Sanctions Beyond Borders: Multinational Corporations and Economic Statecraft (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). His current scholarship on international criminal justice and conflict resolution has appeared in Ethics & International Affairs, Human Rights Quarterly, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and International Criminal Law Review.

Publications

 

BOOKS

• Sanctity versus Sovereignty: The United States and the Nationalization of Natural Resource Investments (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
• Sanctions Beyond Borders: Multinational Corporations and U.S. Economic Statecraft (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

 

JOURNAL ARTICLES

• "Bargaining With The Instruments of Statecraft: Multinational Corporations and U.S. Economic Sanctions Against Nicaragua and Libya" Business and the Contemporary World, 2:4 (Summer 1990), pp. 66-78.
• "Public and Private Sanctions against South Africa," Political Science Quarterly 109:2 (Summer 1994), pp. 313-334.
• "Sanctions at Bay? Hegemonic Decline, Multinational Corporations, and U.S. Economic Sanctions Since the Pipeline Case," International Organization 49:1 (Winter 1995), pp. 105-137.
• "'Think Globally, Punish Locally': Nonstate Actors, Multinational Corporations, and Human Rights Sanctions," Ethics & International Affairs 12 (March 1998), pp. 19-42.
• “Compromising Justice: Why the Bush Administration and the NGOs are Both Wrong about the International Criminal Court” Ethics & International Affairs 20:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 25-53.
• “Darfur and the Limits of Legal Deterrence” Human Rights Quarterly 30:3 (August 2008), pp. 529-560.
• “Is Peace in the Interests of Justice: The Case for Broad Prosecutorial Discretion at the International Criminal Court” Leiden Journal of International Law 22:1 (March 2009), pp. 99-126.
• “Why the ICC Should Operate within Peace Processes.” Ethics & International Affairs 26:1 (Spring 2012), pp. 59-71.
• “Justice is Interventionist: The Political Sources of the Judicial Reach of the Special Court for Sierra Leone,” International Criminal Law Review 13:1 (2013), pp. 63-91.
• “Manipulated Commitments: The International Criminal Court in Uganda.” Human Rights Quarterly 35:2 (May 2013), pp. 271-303 - co-authored with Petie Booth, Colby Class of 2011.
• "Justice as a Dialogue between Law and Politics: Embedding the International Criminal Court in Conflict Management and Peacebuilding." Journal of International Criminal Justice 12:2 (July 2014), pp. 437-469.
• "Intervention and the Justice Cascade: Lessons from the Special Court for Sierra Leone on Prosecution and Civil War." Human Rights Review 16:1 (2015), pp. 39-58.
• "How Politics Shapes the Contributions of Justice: Lessons from the ICTY and the ICTR," 110 AJIL Unbound (2016), pp. 234-239.
• "When Justice Leads, Does Politics Follow?: The Realist Limits of Prosecutorial Agency in Marginalizing War Criminals," 17:1 Journal of International Criminal Justice (March 2019), pp. 13-44.

 

CHAPTERS IN EDITED VOLUMES

• "Markets, Sovereignty, and International Regime Change: Constraints on Nationalization Strategies in Peru and Jamaica," in William P. Avery & David P. Rapkin, eds., Markets, Politics, and Change in the Global Political Economy, Yearbook of International Political Economy: Volume 4 (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989), pp. 127-149.
• "Sanctity versus Sovereignty" in Theodore H. Moran, ed., Governments and Transnational Corporations, United Nations Library on Transnational Corporations: Volume 7 (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 137-152. Reprint of the Conclusion to Sanctity versus Sovereignty.
• "The ICC and Transitional Justice: Should the Prosecutor Exercise His Discretion in the Interests of Peace?” in Roel de Lange, ed., Aspects of Transitional Justice and Human Rights (Nijmegen, The Netherlands: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2007), pp. 5-18.
• “Is Peace in the Interests of Justice? The Case for Broad Prosecutorial Discretion at the International Criminal Court,” in Karen Mingst and Jack Snyder, Essential Readings in World Politics, 4th edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), pp 274-292. – Originally published in the Leiden Journal of International Law.
• "International Criminal Justice," "The Duty to Prosecute," "The Peace versus Justice Debate," "The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia," and "The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda," in Deen Chaterjee, ed., Encyclopedia of Global Justice (Berlin: Springer, 2011), pp. 284-287, 549-546, 824-827.
• “International Criminal Justice” in Hugh LaFollette, ed, International Encyclopedia of Ethics (New York: Wiley, 2013).
• “Justice is Interventionist: The Political Sources of the Judicial Reach of the Special Court for Sierra Leone,” in Meernik, Rothe, and Bohlander, eds., The Realities of International Criminal Justice (Martnus Nijhoff, 2013) – originally published in the International Criminal Law Review.
• "Pacting the Law within Politics: Lessons for the International Criminal Court’s First Investigations.” in Peter Malcontent, ed., Facing the Past: Amending Historical Injustices through Instruments of Transitional Justice (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2016), pp. 91-114.
• "International Criminal Justice.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science. Ed. Sandy Maisel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• “International Criminal Justice” in Hugh LaFollette, ed, International Encyclopedia of Ethics (New York: Wiley, 2019).

 

BOOK REVIEWS

• Oran Young, International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural Resources and the Environment. American Political Science Review 84:2 (June 1990), pp. 726-727.
• Lisa Martin, Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions in American Political Science Review 87:4 (Dec. 1993), pp. 1056-57.
• Robert Massie, Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, Ethics and International Affairs 13 (March 1999), pp. 278-280.
• Alan P. Dobson, US Economic Statecraft for Survival, 1933-1991: Of Sanctions, Embargoes, and Economic Warfare in Journal of American History, 91:2 (Sept 2004), pp. 726-727.
• Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics, David Bosco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Ethics & International Affairs 29.03 (2015): 348-350.

 

UNPUBLISHED PAPERS

• "When Justice Leads, Does Politics Follow? The Realist Limits of Stigmatizing War Criminals Through International Prosecution," Western Political Science Association, San Diego, California, 26 March 2016. Revised Version Presented at the CEEISA-ISA Joint Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 25 June 2016.
• “The Peace versus Justice Debate at the International Criminal Court: The Case of the Ituri Warlords in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” (Pedagogical Case Study, 2011).
• “The ‘Peace versus Justice’ Debate at the International Criminal Court,” IVR World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Jagielonnian University, Krakow, Poland, August 6, 2007
• “Transnational Civil Society and Human Rights Sanctions: The Case of the Free Burma Coalition” American Political Science Association, Boston, Massachusetts, August 29-31, 2002.
• "From Ford-Canada to Helms-Burton: The Domestic Politics of Canadian-American Disputes over Extraterritorial Sanctions," Northeast International Studies Association, Philadelphia, November 13-15, 1997.
• "The Privileged Position of Business in American Foreign Policy" (Paper Presented at Northeast International Studies Association, Philadelphia, Nov. 12-14, 1988).