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

Content-free weekend

by Rodger Payne | 19 January, 2009 |

Obviously, it is slow around here over the long holiday weekend.Here's my brief winter holiday weekend report:1. My wife and oldest daughter left Louisville early Saturday morning to attend the Inaugural. They do not have tickets to any events, so they will be among the masses tomorrow. However, they did have a well-placed friend for a pre-Tuesday function. As a consequence, they already met the President-elect and the rest of the Obamas! More here.2. While most of my family is out of town, I've been reading email and blog posts about the incoming administration.This is the best line, by...

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The “war on terror” is over

by Rodger Payne | 15 January, 2009 |

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband says "for a couple of years now the British Government has used neither the idea nor the phrase 'war on terror'." Miliband was in Mumbai, speaking (transcript here) at the recently targeted Taj Hotel. He made a number of points that new American leaders should embrace. For example, a "war on terror" creates an enemy that does not exist: ...ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken...The notion of a war on terror gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama Bin Laden and the organization of Al Qaeda. In...

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NGOs as the “New Colonialists”

by Rodger Payne | 10 January, 2009 |

Somehow, last summer I missed a Foreign Policy article by Michael A. Cohen, Maria Figueroa Küpçü, and Parag Khanna, which appeared in the July/August 2008 issue. Unfortunately, you won't find much of the article at that link unless you are a subscriber. I happened to see the piece in the November/December Utne Reader. The on-line excerpt is a bit longer there, but you still won't find the full essay. Sorry about that.Nonetheless, the authors' central thesis is certainly provocative and worth discussing even if internet users cannot find the entire piece: [T]he thin line that separates weak...

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Silent coup?

by Rodger Payne | 8 January, 2009 |

Back in September, I blogged about the new Northern Command, which oversees deployment of an Army Brigade Combat Team inside the US -- putting active American troops on the homeland for the first time since 1878 (other than during national emergency). The recent post was a somewhat paranoid followup to one I wrote on July 4, 2007, about NSPD 51. That White House security directive asserts presidential leadership of government during catastrophic emergency. By the standards of the directive, the US arguably had two such emergencies during the Bush years (9/11 and Hurricane Katrina)....

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Foreign Policy and the Blogosphere

by Rodger Payne | 3 January, 2009 |

Many Duck readers probably already noticed the announcement, but perhaps not everyone given the holiday period: two prominent international relations scholar-bloggers are teaming with various scholars, journalists, and former policymakers at Foreign Policy magazine to create a new venture in journalism, blogging and policy analysis. Effective Monday, neither Marc Lynch, aka Abu Aardvark, nor Dan Drezner will be blogging at their former websites. They will be part of the new Foreign Policy team.Congratulations -- and best wishes -- to both of them!Here's how journalist Laura Rozen explains...

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I’ve never met a man…

by Rodger Payne | 29 December, 2008 |

Today, I took the family to the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma. If you've never heard of Rogers, then you might want to learn. He was quite a man.Rogers was an entertainer, a writer, a public speaker, amateur philosopher, etc. In 1931, he went on the radio with President Herbert Hoover to talk about the Depression. He seemed truly troubled by what was happening: So here we are in a country with more wheat and more corn and more money in the bank, more cotton, more everything in the world—there’s not a product that you can name that we haven't got more of it than any other...

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The Duck of Bush

by Rodger Payne | 14 December, 2008 |

President Bush made a secret, surprise visit to Iraq and the local reaction wasn't entirely friendly:In other news, serious analysts might want to take a look at the draft of a federal report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The New York Times has the text online.

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Obama and coal

by Rodger Payne | 5 December, 2008 |

This week, in my International Security class, we discussed energy and environmental issues like climate change. One of my students asked about President-elect Barack Obama's plan to "bankrupt the coal industry." Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made this charge near the end of the presidential election campaign, based on an interview Obama conducted in January with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle. Palin charged that the liberal paper withheld this story, even though the paper has had the audio and video on its website all year (and promoted this fact). The right is still...

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2009 Grawemeyer winner

by Rodger Payne | 2 December, 2008 |

Colgate University Professor Michael Johnston has won the 2009 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The prize is worth $200,000.The press release describes the award-winning ideas from Professor Johnston's Cambridge University Press book: Johnston, a political science professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., earned the prize for ideas he set forth in his 2005 book, Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power and Democracy.Corruption can take different forms depending on a country’s political and economic patterns, Johnston says. The practice of using wealth to seek...

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Next Nostradamus

by Rodger Payne | 1 December, 2008 |

What are you watching?I'm tuned to the History Channel's "Next Nostradamus":Two men sharing startling visions of the future possess distinctly different backgrounds: Michel de Nostradamus was a French apothecary and healer in the 16th century; he would become the most famous seer in history. His 21st century counterpart is Dr. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a renowned political scientist who teaches game theory at New York University and Stanford. While Nostradamus looked to the stars and mysticism to divine his apocalyptic revelations, Dr. Bueno de Mesquita relies on the most omnipotent tool ever...

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