Past winners
2024 - WINNER Prof. Patrick Quinton-Brown, Intervention before Interventionism: A Global Genealogy
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.
Honourable Mention - Rita Abrahamsen, Jean-François Drolet, Michael C. Williams, Srdjan Vucetic, Karin Narita and Alexandra Gheciu, World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order
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.
2023 - Musab Younis, On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (University of California Press, 2022)
2022 - Sumi Madhok, Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
2021 - Rahul Rao, Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (Oxford University Press, 2020).
2020 - Inez Valdez, Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
2019 - Geoff Mann & Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future
(London/New York: Verso, 2018).
2018 - Sean Molly, Kant's International Relations: The Political Theology of Perpetual Peace (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2017); and Catherine Lu, Justice Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
2017 - Faiz Sheikh, Islam & International Relations - Exploring Community and the Limits of Universalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
2016 - Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
2015 - Alexander Anievas (University of Cambridge), Capital, the State and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years' Crisis, 1914-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 2014).
2014 - K. M. Fierke (University of St. Andrews), Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
2013 - Daniel J. Levine (University of Alabama), Recovering International Relations: the Promise of Sustainable Critique (Oxford University Press, 2012).
2012 - Helen M. Kinsella (University of Madison-Wisconsin), The Image Before the Weapon: a Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press, 2011).