2023 Best Paper on Statehood, Sovereignty and Conflict Announcement

We are delighted to be able to announce the co-winners of the 2023 prize for the Best Paper on Statehood, Sovereignty and Conflict: 

‘Women were also settlers: analysing the role of German women in settler violence in German Southwest Africa, 1884-1915’ by Kirsty Campbell

and

‘The bureaucratic revolution: The Syrian opposition’s civil registry system’ by Marika Sosnowski.

The jury (Vera Axyonova, Magdalena Dembinska and Karolina Werner) congratulates Kirsty Campbell for a paper that offers a novel way to connect the study of settler colonialism with feminist perspectives in International Relations. By shifting focus to the agency of women in settler violence and developing a comprehensive analytical framework to engage with the subject, the paper promises empirically rich material providing fascinating insights into German women’s involvement in the colonial enterprise. The paper thus contributes to breaking the boundaries of conventional thinking about the actors involved in building the colonial state. In doing so, it is very relevant both to the themes of the Research Network and to the current processes of decolonization.

The jury congratulates Marika Sosnowski for a paper that is equally conceptually novel and empirically rich. Using the Arabic Islamic concept of Al-Ghayb, the paper adopts a nonconventional approach to study the Syrian revolution and concentrates on the unseen vision of the revolutionary bureaucracy. Drawing on impressive original data, the paper adds an entirely new and empirically grounded perspective on revolutionary events and revolutionaries in Syria. By analytically connecting revolution, bureaucracy and statehood, the paper directly speaks to the themes of the Research Network and advances our understanding of contemporary inter-social revolutions, also beyond the Syrian case.

In deciding the prize, the jury was guided by the aim of the prize to recognise the best paper presented at the ECPR General Conference section of the Research Network that makes, or shows promise for making, a significant contribution to the research areas of the Research Network,  in conceptual, theoretical and/or empirical terms, and demonstrates relevance to current affairs. Papers were nominated by the panel discussants on this basis, and also using this opportunity to highlight the work of early career researchers, and other groups underrepresented in research, such as women, scholars residing in the global south, and LGBT+.

We would also like to congratulate all authors of the following nominated papers, which the jury found of outstanding quality and potential to make important contributions to existing knowledge:

The Long Arm and the Iron Fist: Authoritarian Crackdowns and Transnational Repression by Alexander Dukalskis, Saipira Furstenbergm Sebastian Hellmeier and Redmond Scales

State Sovereignty in the age of strategic competition: China’s extraterritorial forays in Europe by Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente and George Kyris

Performing sovereign aspirations: Tamil insurgency and postwar transition in Sri Lanka by Bart Klem

Secessionist Conflicts as Arenas of Strategic Competition for External Patrons: Case Studies from post-Cold War Europe by Geza Tasner

In the following months, our Network will host a set of activities to honour the prize-winners and their research and we will be in touch with more details in due course.