Sussex International Theory Prize (book award)
Book award
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, we award the Sussex International Theory Prize to honour the best piece of research in International Relations published in book from the year prior.
Eligibility
The work should be in International Relations, broadly conceived – including sub-fields. The work must have been published in the year prior to the award: judged by copyright date. Nominations should be for research monographs only: edited volumes, textbooks, articles and book chapters are not eligible
Submission/Nomination
The award is made annually on the basis of nominations by individuals, publishers and peers. Nominations should take the form of a statement of less than 200 words on why the work could be considered the best piece of innovative theoretical research in International Relations from the previous year. Nominators (including publishers) are limited to one submission
Prize
The recipient will be invited to present their research in a Public Prize Lecture at the University of Sussex. The winner receives £150 worth of books from Cambridge University Press and a two-year print and online subscription to International Theory.
International Theory 2024 Book Prize Lecture
On Wednesday 9 April 2024, the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) held their Sussex International Theory Book Prize Lecture, featuring prize winner Ajay Parasram (Dalhousie University). Ajay's book "Pluriversal Sovereignty and the State: Imperial Encounters in Sri Lanka" won the 2024 International Theory Book Prize.
The book documents the political and cosmological processes through which the idea of “total territorial rule” at the core of the modern international system came into being in the context of early to mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon (Sri Lanka). It develops a decolonial theoretical framework informed by a “pluriverse” of multiple ontologies of sovereignty to argue that the territorial state itself is an outcome of imperial globalization. Anti-colonialism up to the mid nineteenth century was grounded in genealogies and practices of sovereignty that developed in many localities. By the mid to late nineteenth century, however, the global state system and the states within it were forming through colonizing and anti-colonizing vectors. The modern territorial state predates modern nationalism and created a contaminated container in which anticolonialism had been constricted by the late nineteenth century in Ceylon, but also elsewhere in the British Empire. By focusing on the ontological conflicts that shaped the state and empire, we can rethink the birth of the British Raj and place it in Ceylon some fifty years earlier than in India. In this way, the book makes a theoretical contribution to postcolonial and decolonial studies in globalization and international relations by considering the ontological significance of “total territorial rule” as it emerged historically in Ceylon. Through emphasizing one important manifestation of modernity and coloniality - the territorial state - the book contributes to research that studies the politics of ontological diversity, sovereignty, postcolonial and decolonial international studies, and globalization through colonial encounters.
Ajay is an Associate Professor in International Development Studies and History at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk, Mi'kma'ki.
The 2025 lecture will be held in the Spring of 2026. Further details to be announced in due course.
2025 Prize Winners
CAIT are pleased to announce the 2025 Sussex International Theory Prize winner and honourable mention. The CAIT book award panel selected the following book for the 2025 Sussex International Theory Prize:
Patrick Quinton-Brown's "Intervention before Interventionism: A Global Genealogy" (Oxford University Press, 2024)
Additionally, the following book earned an honourable mention from the CAIT book award panel:
Rita Abrahamsen, Jean-François Drolet, Michael C. Williams, Srdjan Vucetic, Karin Narita and Alexandra Gheciu's "World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order" (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
The CAIT book award panel statements on the books are below:
"Intervention before Interventionism: A Global Genealogy" captures international politics at a critical juncture. It seems that arguments for liberal interventionism that have dominated foreign-policy making debates and academic discourses in International Relations for the last two to three decades are in decline, while debates about state sovereignty, borders, and non-intervention, as well as a sharp distinction about domestic and international politics are on the rise again. In Intervention before Interventionism, Patrick Quinton-Brown not only provides a comprehensive historical account on why interventionism was an intellectual and empirical failed attempt that was clouded in liberal ideology – and therefore could not understand the limits of a post-Second World War international society and the role of the Global South – but it also offers an epistemological reconsideration of questions of intervention and non-intervention. His book achieves the latter through a rich genealogy of intervention since the end of the Second World War. By focusing on non-Western contestations of Western-dominated order, particularly in the Non-Aligned Movement and the Bandung Conference, he illustrates institutional change in and through decolonisation and provides a fresh conceptual roadmap for understanding dilemmas of intervention and non-intervention in the twenty-first century.
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"World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order" provides a timely and important intervention in understanding the global rise of far-right political parties and movements, one of the most daunting political dynamics of the twenty-first century. Providing the first analysis of their rise and global interconnectedness, its authors Rita Abrahamsen, Jean-François Drolet, Michael C. Williams, Srdjan Vucetic, Karin Narita, and Alexandra Gheciu not only trace the intellectual roots of the global radical Right, but they also demonstrate that their global cooperation is not accidental. Rather, their cooperation has to be conceived of as the conscious attempt to launch a counter-hegemonic struggle against globalisation and the liberal world order. Having been inspired by the work of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, the authors show in World of the Right that despite ideological and thematic differences, a radical Right has emerged that crosses national boundaries to an extent that it seems to have irrevocable effects on present and future world politics.