The Duck of Minerva

Rodger Payne

Rodger A. Payne is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville. He serves on the University’s Sustainability Council and was a co-founder of the Peace, Conflict, and Social Justice program. He is the author of dozens of journal articles and book chapters and coauthor, with Nayef Samhat, of Democratizing Global Politics: Discourse Norms, International Regimes, and Political Community (SUNY, 2004). He is currently working on two major projects, one exploring the role of narratives in international politics and the other examining the implications of America First foreign policy.

Recent Posts

The legitimacy of America’s wars

by Rodger Payne | 24 September, 2009 |

Last night, over a good meal, two Department colleagues and I talked with several out-of-town guests for quite some time about the prolonged war in Afghanistan. Eventually, I happened to make a point that a fellow blogger said seemed novel and interesting -- certainly worthy of a blog post.Let's see if anyone agrees.As many experts note, the war in Afghanistan is prolonged in large part because too much of the local population sees the U.S.-NATO intervention as illegitimate. Regardless of good intentions, Americans are seen as unwanted foreign invaders. Moreover, even U.S. Generals concede...

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Reading Fareed

by Rodger Payne | 15 September, 2009 |

Recently, I've been reading and mostly enjoying Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. It is a remarkable book, offering sweeping analysis of all sorts of global trends. Not just anyone could have tackled this project and it is definitely to Zakaria's credit that he has put together a well-written and interesting book about an important topic -- the apparent long-term relative decline of the U.S. and the rise of the "rest" of the world (especially China and India). "The great shift taking place in the world might prove to be less about culture and more about power" (p. 86; author's...

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The IR Analogy

by Rodger Payne | 17 August, 2009 |

Periodically, scholars of international relations point out that the "domestic analogy" fails to explain IR. As Hidemi Suganami explains:The term ‘domestic analogy’ refers to the idea that inter-state relations are amenable to the same type of institutional control as the relations of individuals and groups within states. Because of anarchy, realists like John Mearsheimer explain, state behavior cannot be managed by external institutions attempting to wield executive, legislative or judicial power. This past week, I've been thinking about American domestic politics -- particularly in the...

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Climate Politics: IR and the Environment

by Rodger Payne | 12 August, 2009 |

Starting this week, I'll be blogging until at least the end of the year on the e-IR website. The blog is narrowly focused on Climate Politics: IR and the Environment, so I'll still be blogging about other international relations topics here at the Duck. The idea is to focus on the run up to the UN Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen this December.Hopefully, I'll have something to say as I'm currently writing a chapter on the politics of climate change for a new edition of Ralph Carter's USFP textbook. Also, I'm teaching "Global Ecopolitics" this fall, with a focus on climate change. If...

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Desertification between the rivers

by Rodger Payne | 30 July, 2009 |

The Iraqi people have suffered tremendously this decade -- and are apparently suffering even more this summer. The LA Times is reporting today that Iraq's latest calamity is an "environmental catastrophe." Decades of war and mismanagement, compounded by two years of drought, are wreaking havoc on Iraq's ecosystem, drying up riverbeds and marshes, turning arable land into desert, killing trees and plants, and generally transforming what was once the region's most fertile area into a wasteland.Falling agricultural production means that Iraq, once a food exporter, will this year have to import...

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Is America cool again?

by Rodger Payne | 28 July, 2009 |

According to the latest data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, "the image of the United States has improved markedly in most parts of the world reflecting global confidence in Barack Obama."Follow the Pew survey link to find data charting some dramatic American improvements throughout the world. The biggest upswings seem to have occurred in Western Europe, parts of Latin America, India, and in Indonesia and Nigeria. Note that in some of these states the U.S. image was already on the upswing the past year or so following lows achieved earlier this decade.Data from Eastern Europe, Russia,...

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RIP: Robert McNamara

by Rodger Payne | 6 July, 2009 |

Robert McNamara was arguably one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. I summarized the highlights from his CV on my blog a few years ago: He was a Harvard professor, an executive at Ford Motor Company (the first leader not from the Ford family), Secretary of Defense from 1961-1967, and then President of the World Bank until 1981.This sentence omits the role McNamara played in World War II, which involved his assignment to the Office of Statistical Control for the Army Air Force. He evaluated the efficiency and effectiveness of U.S. B-29 bombers, which ultimately firebombed 67...

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Oops

by Rodger Payne | 3 July, 2009 |

The Barnes and Noble website is currently advertising a new and potentially interesting book slated to be issued later this summer: Historical Dictionary of Terrorism by Sean K. Anderson. Unfortunately, the book pictured is not the one advertised -- the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Islam by Ludwig W. Adamec: ISLAM is clearly readable in all caps and quite large font.Anyone can make a mistake, but this one is particularly clumsy. Here's a screen capture: Hat tip: freelance journalist David Zax. Check out his pieces in The Smithsonian.

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Cheney: The Most Dangerous Veep Ever?

by Rodger Payne | 27 June, 2009 |

In the June 15 dead-tree version of The Nation (online since May 27), Jonathan Schell writes that the Iraq war was produced by torture. Everyone knows that the "war on terror" and the Iraq war produced torture, but few have focused on the reversed causal arrow. And we are still learning details of the prominent and apparently unprecedented role Vice President Dick Cheney played in approving torture and promoting war.To document his charge, Schell references a remarkable blog post at The Washington Note penned by Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin...

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