From the Standing Group on Methods of Normative Political Theory

From the Standing Group on Methods of Normative Political Theory

Nominations for the Onora O’Neill Political Theory Prize are now open. The nominations should be submitted via email at the following email address: ecproopt@gmail.com , with a.poama@fgga.leidenuniv.nl (the jury chair) in CC. The deadline for nominations is January 31^st, 2026, 23:59pm, CET. Details about the nomination process follow below. The Onora O’Neill Political Theory Prize[1], sponsored by Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP) aims to recognize the best book published in political theory in the last three years. Political theory is widely construed to include political philosophy, the history of political thought, the methodology of political theory and philosophy, public ethics, and the ethics of public policy. The prize cuts across all traditions, orientations and approaches in political theory, political thought, and political philosophy, and does not take into account whether the nominated works are first book publications or not. The prize is sponsored financially and editorially by CRISPP, and organizationally by four ECPR political theory & political thought Standing Groups (Political Theory, International Political Theory, Kantian Political Thought, Methods of Normative Political Theory)

Procedure

• The prize is awarded every year at the ECPR General Conference, at the beginning of the ECPR Theory Plenary
• The winner of the prize commits in principle to be present at the ECPR Theory Plenary
• The prize is accompanied by a GBP 250 financial reward.
• The prize winning book will be the topic of a panel at the ECPR General Conference. This panel will be considered for publication as a book symposium in CRISPP (following consideration and acceptance of a proposal by the CRISPP editorial team detailing the symposium editor, contributors and abstracts of their papers; and subject to peer review of the final submission). Publication is not guaranteed

Nomination requirements

• Only books published in the last 3 years are admissible (i.e., not earlier than January 2022)
• In the nomination text, please submit a book abstract (no longer than 1,000 words) and a pdf copy of the book. Hard copies should be sent only if the book has been long-listed for the prize (see below)
• Books can be nominated by one academic affiliated with an ECPR institution (the nomination can come from PhD students, postdocs, tenure-track or tenured academics) or be self-nominated
• The book will be considered for a symposium publication in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP). As much as possible, nominations have to indicate 3-5 names of academics that could take part in the book symposium
• Books can be nominated more than once
• Nominations have to submitted by January 31^st , 2026. The decision is taken and announced during the summer of 2026. Our aim is to have a book prize symposium panel included in the 2026 ECPR General Conference (September 8-11, 2026). If needed, the symposium panel will be organized in hybrid format and, irrespective of the speakers’ mode of participation

Jury composition and decision procedure

• The jury is composed of one secretary (with a term of 4 years, renewable once), and 8 members (2 members/standing group from Political Theory, International Political Theory, Kantian Thought, and Methods of Normative Political Theory). The jury members serve a 1-year term, renewable twice
• The jury members are nominated by the steering committees of their standing groups in coordination with the secretary of the jury. It is desirable that the members of the jury (other than the secretary) are not members of the steering committees (in particular, to ensure increased diversity and wider participation across those standing groups)
• When selecting jury members, steering committees are required to ensure gender diversity
• The secretary of the jury is selected every four years, following open vote, by the members of the four steering committees of the standing groups indicated above
• The jury members are not allowed to nominate/have nominated a book for the prize, and they should disclose any potential conflict of interest with the authors of the short-listed books
• Decision procedure:
  • The secretary draws a list of admissible nominations (books have to fall in the relevant discipline category). Based on their open access to the list of nominations received, jury members can veto any nomination exclusion. This brings a nominated book back into the list of admissible nominations
  • The selection procedure includes a long and a short list of nominations (max. 9 books for the long list; max. 5 books for the short list)
  • It is desirable that hard copies of the book be sent to the jury members at a deadline indicated following the selection to the long list
  • Only jury members directly vote and deliberate on the ranking of the nominations, on the long and short lists, on the prize winner and, should that be the case, on the runner-up
  • The secretary plays a coordinating and facilitating role in the deliberation process leading to the selection of the long and short lists, and of the prize winner
  • The winner is selected, as much as possible, via jury consensus. If that is not possible, the winner is selected following a qualified majority rule (6/8)
  • Should the decision result in an ex aequo situation, the secretary votes as well

 

CRISPP Guidelines for Book Symposium Editors

CRISPP will consider the proceedings of the prize laureate for publication, but publication is not guaranteed. The contributions should be short essays of 3000 words maximum,  inclusive of abstract and references. This would mean a maximum of of 4x3 for the commentators, and 1x4,000 for the author to reply. CRISPP would also like the editor to write a brief introduction (1x3000) setting the context for the symposium – why the book is important in the debates it addresses, and outlining the main arguments of the book so the symposium could be read by someone yet to read the book. This adds up to a maximum of 20,000 words for the entire Symposium (building in some wiggle room). It is very important to keep to that limit as CRISPP needs to be able to include three or four other articles in the issue. CRISPP also expects that there to be a good gender balance among the contributors and some ethnic, career stage and geographical diversity. We require that either two referees look at the whole symposium, or that each piece is refereed separately. We can agree who that would be beforehand – CRISPP would be grateful if you could suggest referees and then if they look adequate (a concern is avoiding using people CRISPP has recently approached) you as the symposium editor can make the arrangement with them directly.  It is best to get the commentators’ pieces refereed first before the author writes his/her reply, otherwise it can be difficult to ask for revisions. So, the response should only be written once the commentaries are approved. CRISPP would then like to see the reports and the authors responses to them. Note that we do all of this outside the editorial manager system – I spare those unused to its quirks the unedifying experience of grappling with it. NB: important issues concerning submission: All contributions must be in CRISPP format. It’s very important these are done properly and follow the guidelines.

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[1] Onora O’Neill’s work combines political philosophy, political theory and moral philosophy scholarship with public policy-oriented activities. She has extensively published on questions pertaining to trust and trustworthiness, justice, accountability, consent, the role of public universities, and the ethics of communication in the context of emerging digital technologies. She was the president of the British Academy, served as the chair the Nuffield Foundation and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and was member of the Medical Research Council and Banking Standards Board. She is the recipient of various awards, prizes and official recognitions (including the Berggruen Prize). 

Past Academic Events

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ECPR General Conference 2025

26-29 August 2025 Aristotle University Thessaloniki, Greece

This past August, we gathered in at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki for the ECPR General Conference. This year’s Section was co-organised by Glorianne Wilkins and Ed Handby. The Section featured a wide range of topics, across a diverse set of panels as well as plenty of walking to take in the sights and sounds of Thessaloniki. On behalf of the organising team, it was great to see the continuing development and expansion of the presence of methodologists at the General Conference, which will only continue through the Joint Sessions and next years General Conference.

Alongside the presentations and socialising, the Standing Group also made plans and prepreations for the next round of ECPR events. The Standing Group will be submitting a workshop proposal for the Joint Sessions to be held in Innsbruk, Austria. Marina Vahter and Sune Lægaard will be orgainsing this proposal. Secondly, the 2026 ECPR General Conference will be held in Kraków, Poland. Esma Baycan-Herzog and Ed Handby will be co-organising the Section for ECPR 2027.

Best Paper Prize

The 2025 General Conference was the perfect opportunity to launch a new prize – the Best Paper at the General Conference. Participants and members of the audience were asked to nominate a presentation to the judging panel of Jonathan and Esma. They are happy to announce joint winners for the inaugural prize: Sania Ismailee and Lucas de Melo Prado.

This framework includes a classification of different types of social inequalities and a list of liberal claims used to justify them. The justificatory claims are organised according to their argumentative strength and their relationship to core liberal concepts. Both the classification and the justificatory claims of inequalities form a codebook, with precise definitions and examples designed for the qualitative coding and analysis of data. Moreover, Lucas’s paper outlines the ten theoretical and empirical steps he followed to develop and apply this framework of liberal claims of inequality. This ten-step procedure was conceived to be a replicable model, offering a pathway for researchers to create similar frameworks for other topics or other ideological and theoretical approaches. Lucas’s work, therefore, provides a practical tool for the analysis and evaluation of political rhetorics of inequality, as well as a methodological contribution to normative theory, particularly considering the methodological turn in the field.

Despite the fact that diverse religious family laws are discriminatory toward women, a dominant view among Indian political theorists is to oppose a UCC.
Sania’s research closely examines this puzzle. Her paper, “Contextualism in Indian Political Theory: Lessons from and for the Family Law Reform Debate,” offers a novel critique of how Indian political theorists engage with the UCC debate through contextualism. She identifies two crucial “contingent contextual considerations”—the rise of Hindutva nationalism and its impact on Muslim minorities—as the starting points for this conversation. By using Sune Lægaard’s concept of “critical distance,” Sania proposes a principled engagement with the family law reform debate in India. Her research has broader implications for how political philosophy is practiced in India and for theoretical engagements with religious family laws beyond the pervasive framework of multiculturalism.

Onora O’Neill Book Prize in Political Theory

Together with the other political theory standing groups in the ECPR, we are launching the Onora O’Neill Book Prize in Political Theory. This prize recognises and celebrates the best book in political theory released in a given year, not just first book! The jury for the prize will be comprised of two members from each of the four theory standing groups. A call for nominations for members of the jury was sent out by Jonathan earlier in September.

Upcoming Academic Events / News

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On Friday October 3rd, our Chair, Jonathan Floyd, will be giving a one-day workshop on methods and methodology in political theory in Dublin, jointly hosted by University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, and organised in turn by Peter Stone (Trinity) and Alexa Zellentin (UCD).

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Recent Publications

Turner, Ben. 2024. “Situating realism, the ethnographic sensibility, and comparative political theory within the methodological turn in political theory.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 27(1): 387–406.

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Editorial Team

Edmund Handby is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research examines methodological questions in the history of political thought, empirically informed political theory, and politics, philosophy, and economics. His work has appeared in The Journal of Politics, the European Journal of Political Theory, and The Journal of the Philosophy of History.

Glorianne Wilkins is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Theory at the University of Potsdam. Her thesis is on “Uncertainty and Decision Making in a Political World.” Her research engages with the theoretical disciplines of political philosophy, political epistemology, and liberal democratic theory. She is particularly interested in the nature of unquestioned assumptions as it relates to particular concepts taken as fundamental to contemporary politics: truth, (liberal) democracy, among others. Through her research she considers how engaging with these concepts and their assumptions can inform how we make decisions under greater conditions of uncertainty.

Sania Ismailee is an Assistant Professor at the School of Law, BML Munjal University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political philosophy, law, and religion. Sania’s research interests also include critically examining the methodology of Indian political theory debates. Her dissertation examined normative justifications around diverse religious family laws in India (the Uniform Civil Code Debate) from perspectives on secularism, gender justice, and religious freedom. She was a Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Researcher at Columbia University and a Commonwealth Split-Site Fellow at the University of Oxford. Sania has published on the Karnataka hijab controversy, comparing V. D. Savarkar’s and B. R. Ambedkar’s comments on Muslims, affective approaches to justice, along with several book reviews on religion and political theory.

Lucas de Melo Prado is a PhD candidate at University College Dublin, specialising in applied political theory and distributive justice. His current research examines the last seven presidential elections in the USA and Brazil to evaluate candidates’ rhetoric of inequality from a liberal perspective. Before his PhD studies, Lucas worked for nine years as a lecturer of Moral and Legal Philosophy at three Brazilian law schools (Uniavan, Sinergia, and Univali). He also published in various Brazilian peer-reviewed journals, such as the Brazilian Journal of International Law and the Brazilian Journal Law and Politics (“Revista Eletrônica Direito e Política”).

From the Standing Group on Methods of Normative Political Theory

Upcoming Academic Events

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ECPR General Conference 2025

26-29 August 2025 Aristotle University Thessaloniki, Greece The lineup of panels and papers for this year’s Methods of Normative Theory section has now been finalised. The section has gone from strength to strength over the years, and this trend continues with an excellent set of papers and presenters on the schedule. In line with this year’s focus on methodological innovation, we are happy to confirm the following panels:

Digital Methods and Political Theory

This panel will consider how digital technology is transforming societal norms and structures, as well as political practice and discourse. Scholars are invited to discuss the possibilities as well as challenges that digital methods pose for normative political theory, including topics like algorithmic bias, AI, data privacy, and digital citizenship.

Emotion as Method

This panel explores the role of emotion as a methodological tool in normative political theory, examining how emotions shape political judgment, engagement, and theorization. Contributions might consider approaches that attend to lived emotional experiences, the role of negative emotions in political critique, or the role of passion in politics and normative inquiry.

Methodologies for Interconnected Global Issues

This panel will explore methodologies that account for interconnected systems such as climate change, which intersects with public policy, law, economics, and technology.

New Methods, Old Problems

This panel invites scholars to address how innovative methodologies might offer novel insights into longstanding political theory debates.

Normative Theory and Empirical Evidence

This panel examines how normative theory might innovate by integrating more closely with empirical research, bridging ethical discussions with practical realities.

Old Methods, New Problems

This panel invites scholars to address the limits of certain methodologies in light of contemporary challenges such as migration and climate change.

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Each panel will benefit from comments and guidance from an esteemed group of discussants! Registration is expected to open this month. We look forward to seeing you all in Greece!

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Any questions can be directed to Section co-chairs Glorianne Wilkins (wilkins@uni-potsdam.de) and Edmund Handby (edmund.handby@duke.edu).

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Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History

Self and State: Intellectual Histories of Citizenship

Registration is now open for this year’s graduate conference taking place on Tuesday 24 June 2025, 9am.

To register for a ticket, please click this link: https://ptih-graduate-conference.eventbrite.co.uk/.

The keynote address will be delivered by Professor Mia Bay, and the four panels will bring together a brilliant group of emerging scholars in the field of political thought and intellectual history. Papers were chosen because of the important questions they raise about the place of the “self” and the “state” in conceptions of citizenship. All delegates are invited to a free lunch and drinks reception. Panel 1: Within the Metropole – Marginalised Voices Panel 2: Outside the Metropole – Empire Lunch Panel 3: Dismantling the State – Cosmopolitanism Panel 4: Without/Before the State Keynote Address and Drinks Reception

Call For Papers, Abstracts and More

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2026 BIAPT conference

https://www.associationforpoliticalthought.ac.uk/biapt-2026-in-edinburgh-call-for-papers/

Call for Papers

We are delighted to announce the call for papers for our next annual conference, to be held at the University of Edinburgh, 7–9 January 2026.

Submission deadline: Thursday 17 July 2025, 6pm BST.

Please submit proposals here.

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Moral Philosophy and Politics Symposium: Philosophizing the Indefensible by Shmuel Nili

Guest Editor: Ben Jones (Pennsylvania State University)

https://philevents.org/event/show/136293

Call for Papers:

Papers should be submitted by October 31, 2025, and should be between 3,000 and 12,000 words in length. All submissions will undergo Moral Philosophy and Politics’ double-blind refereeing process.

Submit manuscripts via http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mopp.

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ECPR Political Theory Seminars (Online)

Call for Abstracts

Submissions are now open for the ECPR Political Theory Online Seminar 2025–2026.

Abstracts due 15 August 2025: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/79067/submitter

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Recent Publications

Esma Baycan-Herzog. 2025. “Incremental steps and residential security: the methodology of celebrating humble normative improvements.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Esma Baycan-Herzog. 2025. “A Moderate Methodological Nationalist Critique of Multicultural Nationalism: A Response to Will Kymlicka.” Democratic Theory, 12(1): 15–38.

Eva Erman, Markus Furendal, and Niklas Möller. 2025. “Algorithmic Fairness and Feasibility.” Philosophy & Technology, 38(3).

Loren King. 2025. “How should we do political theory? Reading Rawls on method.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.