Rate My Professor Ken Rodman

Ken Rodman is the William R. Cotter Distinguished Teaching Professor of Government at Colby College, a position he has held since joining the faculty in 1989. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, he was the inaugural director of Colby’s interdisciplinary International Studies Program—now the Global Studies Program—and the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights. Rodman received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983, with a dissertation on U.S. policy toward expropriation of raw material investments in the developing world, and his B.A. in Politics from Brandeis University in 1976.

His scholarship centers on international criminal justice and conflict resolution, with expertise encompassing business-government relations in foreign policy, economic sanctions, U.S. foreign policy, the United Nations, nuclear weapons proliferation, and international relations. He is the author of Sanctity versus Sovereignty: The United States and the Nationalization of Natural Resource Investments (Columbia University Press, 1988) and Sanctions Beyond Borders: Multinational Corporations and U.S. Economic Statecraft (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). Rodman has published extensively in top-tier journals, with articles on economic sanctions including “Public and Private Sanctions against South Africa” (Political Science Quarterly, 1994) and “Sanctions at Bay? Hegemonic Decline, Multinational Corporations, and U.S. Economic Sanctions Since the Pipeline Case” (International Organization, 1995). His more recent work addresses the intersection of justice and peace processes, such as “Darfur and the Limits of Legal Deterrence” (Human Rights Quarterly, 2008), “Is Peace in the Interests of Justice: The Case for Broad Prosecutorial Discretion at the International Criminal Court” (Leiden Journal of International Law, 2009), “Justice as a Dialogue between Law and Politics: Embedding the International Criminal Court in Conflict Management and Peacebuilding” (Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2014), and “When Justice Leads, Does Politics Follow?: The Realist Limits of Prosecutorial Agency in Marginalizing War Criminals” (Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2019). He has also contributed chapters to edited volumes and encyclopedias on these topics.