The ideal river How control of nature shaped the international order (2022) by Joanne Yao

On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (2022) by Musab Younis

Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) is pleased to announce the 2023 Sussex International Theory Prize winner and honourable mention.

In 2011, the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) was established by the Department of International Relations within the School of Global Studies of the University of Sussex. The core mission of the Centre is to support and disseminate innovative fundamental research in international theory, free of the requirement for direct policy. 

Annually, CAIT awards the Sussex International Theory Prize to honour the best piece of research in International Relations published in book from the year prior.

This year, the CAIT book award panel selected the following book for the 2022 Sussex International Theory Prize:

Musab Younis (2022) On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (University of California Press).

And the following book earned an honourable mention from the CAIT book award panel:

Joanne Yao  (2022) The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped International Order (Manchester University Press).

Below are the CAIT book award panel statements on the books:

Musab Younis: On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (University of California Press, 2022)

On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought provides an original account of an anticolonial conception of ‘the international’ during the interwar period that foregrounded and operated on a planetary scale. This anti-imperial conception considered race as constitutive of Eurocentric imperialist notions of the world through elucidating the ways in which racial ‘epidermalization’ was fundamentally bound up with planetary processes. The argument is based on painstaking research into archives of both English- and French-language anticolonial writing in France, the United States, and West Africa. It shows that Black Atlantic anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles at national levels were conceived of and fought in internationalist terms. On the Scale of the World offers a set of major theoretical advances that privilege Black interwar, anticolonial literary and political writings as sources of international theory. These theoretical insights are housed within international studies but speak directly to scholars of History, Geography, Literary Studies, and critical theory. Three contributions deserve mention. First, through challenging the dichotomy of the scales of the global and the corporeal, the book questions the idea that positioned critique is antithetical to the planetary. It therefore enriches and transforms key concepts in international studies and shows how ideas of global order have never simply been the exclusive preserve of Western privileged actors. Second, the book’s reading of interwar Black Atlantic print cultures, especially newspapers, demonstrates the textual mechanisms by which international theory has been produced and travelled ‘from below’. And third, On the Scale of the World implicitly addresses nativist charges against postcolonialism by demonstrating the consciously and intrinsically world-historical cast of Black Atlantic internationalism and nationalism. 

Joanne Yao: The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped International Order (Manchester University Press, 2022)

The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped International Order provides a new perspective on the rise of the modern international order by reinterpreting the formation of international organisations (IOs) as a product of the trialectics of empire, state-formation, and modernity’s tendential domination of nature. Through an empirically rich and theoretically informed account of the 19^th century projects to tame the Rhine, Danube, and Congo rivers, the book demonstrates the centrality of the conquest of nature and the concomitant deployment of modern science to the rise and development of the modern/colonial world system. Combining insights of international theory and Historical Sociology to conceptualise the river as a ‘lifeform’, the book illuminates how a domineering geographical imagination animated an international liberal project that foregrounded the control of the nature as a global standard of economic and political legitimacy. The Ideal River therefore also provides a critical framework for thinking beyond modernist modes of domination over, and possessive ownership of nature, towards a just and green international order.