LATEST NEWS: IDSS Book Award 2026

The winner of the 2026 Felicia Krishna Hensel IDSS Book Award is Yuliya Zabyelina for the book Between Immunity and Impunity: External Accountability of Political Elites for Transnational Crime (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Yuliya Zabyelina’s Between Immunity and Impunity: External Accountability of Political Elites for Transnational Crime (Cambridge University Press, 2024) probes the tensions between state sovereignty and the transnational criminality of state officials. It charts challenges to extraterritoriality in an interconnected world, updating the problematic of extraterritorial immunity. Zabyelina rightly worries that criminality by diplomatic officials can delegitimate the more general transnational criminal justice regimes. Recognizing the limits of existing legal and institutional remedies, the book argues that it is possible to for foreign courts to hold foreign state officials to account, proposing original strategies for holding transnational state officials accountable and providng justice for their victims. Targeting financial crimes such as money-laundering, drug trafficking, and trafficking in domestic labor the argument seeks a more robust regime of transnational justice. One of the aims of the Interdisciplinary Studies Section is to encourage work that does not fit the usual disciplines of international relations while addressing important global issues that have received too little scholarly attention. This work in transnational criminal justice fits this aim well. 

– Stephen J. Rosow, Committee Chair, State University of New York at Oswego (Emeritus).

CALL: Felicia Krishna Hensel IDSS Book AwarD

The IDSS has established a book award that recognizes a work that is an original and outstanding contribution to interdisciplinary studies, broadly defined. Interdisciplinary studies are unique in making conceptual and methodological connections across disciplines, challenging disciplinary orthodoxies, and critically applying research techniques and approaches across multiple disciplines. Given the interconnectedness of our globalized world, researchers need to use techniques and methods inspired by various disciplines to comprehensively address a wider array of transnational events, issues, and challenges.

GENERAL INFORMATION

Submissions must meet the following criteria:

  • Authors must be current members of ISA.
  • Books may be single or multi-authored and must be original works (not textbooks or translations). Edited volumes will not be considered for the award.
  • Books must have been published within the two-year period preceding the year of the competition.
  • Books must fall into the broadly defined category of interdisciplinary studies in approach and/or subject matter, as understood by the selection committee.
Prize

The winner will be announced at the ISA Annual Convention and will be awarded a certificate and cash prize of $250. In addition to the award for Best Book, the Committee may award ‘Honorable Mention’ to one or more books that, in the Committee’s view, merit this distinction.

Selection process

The selection committee will be comprised of three section members, headed by a chair of the committee. The 2026 Award Committee is comprised of:

  • Prof. Stephen J. Rosow (stephen.rosow@oswego.edu), 25 Parade Place, Apt. 6G, Brooklyn, NY 11226, USA;
  • Prof. Evelyn Clark Benavides (evelyn.benavides@oswego.edu), 44 High Street, Geneva, NY 14456, USA; and
  • Prof. Fotini Bellou (fbellou@uom.edu.gr), Department of International and European Studies, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki 54636, GREECE.
Applying for this award

To be considered for this award, books may be submitted to the award committee by any person, including the author(s). Self-nominations are welcome. To be considered, one copy of the book must be sent directly to each of the members of the Award Committee.

As Professor Bellou is in Greece, publishers are kindly reminded to make sure that all postal expenses to EU countries are covered. The Committee will accept submissions in hard copy; under exceptional circumstances it will allow electronic submissions, to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Books must be received by May 31, 2025

Felicia Krishna Hensel IDSS Book Award 2026

Yuliya Zabyelina’s Between Immunity and Impunity: External Accountability of Political Elites for Transnational Crime (Cambridge University Press, 2024) probes the tensions between state sovereignty and the transnational criminality of state officials. It charts challenges to extraterritoriality in an interconnected world, updating the problematic of extraterritorial immunity. Zabyelina rightly worries that criminality by diplomatic officials can delegitimate the more general transnational criminal justice regimes. Recognizing the limits of existing legal and institutional remedies, the book argues that it is possible to for foreign courts to hold foreign state officials to account, proposing original strategies for holding transnational state officials accountable and providng justice for their victims. Targeting financial crimes such as money-laundering, drug trafficking, and trafficking in domestic labor the argument seeks a more robust regime of transnational justice. One of the aims of the Interdisciplinary Studies Section is to encourage work that does not fit the usual disciplines of international relations while addressing important global issues that have received too little scholarly attention. This work in transnational criminal justice fits this aim well. 

– Stephen J. Rosow, Committee Chair, State University of New York at Oswego (Emeritus).

2026 HONORABLE MENTIONS

Eleanor Paynter’s Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (University of California Press, 2024) shows in detail how the legacy of colonialism burrows deeply into the politics of social consciousness of former colonial states and the Global North, combining ethnographic research with the testimony of refugees who have survived the often-treacherous crossing from Africa to Italy. Upon arrival they enter an apparatus of emergency that frames their presence as a danger and threat. Drawing on a rich panoply of refugee testimony in ethnographic interviews, film, literature, social media and public performances, Paynter contests the narrative and apparatus of “emergency” that frames immigration as a “crisis” that enables racial and ethnic marginalization and repression. Focusing on Italy, the book exposes as contestable and contested the racialist and repressive narratives that have dominated debates and policies about immigration in the Global North. 

– Stephen J. Rosow, Committee Chair, State University of New York at Oswego (Emeritus).

Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Banu Bargu traverses a wide range of critical and political theories to parse the political subjectivity of performances of corporeal resistance to oppression in the Global South. Examining in detail acts of self-destruction, beginning with Mohammad Bouazizi’s self-immolation in 2010, disembodiment develops a “counter-history” of political agency in the Global South, with implications for understanding political subjectivity, agency, and corporeal politics in the present. Its wide-ranging yet sharply focused argument convincingly redirects attention to liminal acts of social resistance and protest as central to the colonial present, giving voice to those who see no option but to resist oppression with their bodies and lives. Disembodiment is an important work of global political theory. 

– Stephen J. Rosow, Committee Chair, State University of New York at Oswego (Emeritus).

Felicia Krishna Hensel IDSS Book Award 2025

Natasha Wheatley’s The Life and Death of States (Princeton University Press, 2023) impresses with its compelling historical argument, the richness of its conceptual framework and its implications for current global conditions. The Life and Death of States fluidly crosses and challenges disciplinary boundaries in a compelling argument that the dissolution of the Habsburg empire reimagined the possibilities and meaning of sovereignty in the modern states system. It successfully weaves political and legal theory focusing on Jellinek and Kelson, among others, together with conceptual and institutional history, capturing the continuities and discontinuities in debates on sovereignty. Moreover, the book challenges us to rethink sovereignty in a world in which decolonization and the end of the Cold War continue to problematize and challenge state boundaries and identities in much of the world, and in which globalization continues to undermine modern meanings of statehood and stateness. 

– Stephen J. Rosow, Committee Chair, State University of New York at Oswego (Emeritus).

Elena Shih’s Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue (University of California Press, 2023) stands out for its important and impassioned argument, and for its superb trans-disciplinary method and approach, fluidly integrating political economy, ethnography, human rights and feminism. Manufacturing Freedom’s argument sets the exploitation of sex workers into the context of the more general commercial objectification of the subjects of “humanitarianism.” This is a brave critical work that sees complexity where others see simplicity. Using case studies based on in-depth ethnographic participatory research, the book seeks to recover the voices of sex workers themselves in the Global South that too often are obscured by market-oriented institutionalizations of an anti-trafficking industry. 

– Stephen J. Rosow, Committee Chair, State University of New York at Oswego (Emeritus).

Felicia Krishna Hensel IDSS Book Award 2024

The winner of the 2024 Felicia Krishna Hensel IDSS Book Award is Kate Cronin-Furman for the book Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting accountability for mass atrocities (Cornell University Press, 2022).

In Hypocrisy and Human Rights, Kate Cronin-Furman seeks to address the critical question of how repressive states deal with the quest for international justice on the aftermath of mass atrocities, and more specifically, how effective traditional advocacy strategies and tactics are in these situations. In her study, Cronin-Furman skillfully dissects debates over transitional justice in several countries that include, among others, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sri Lanka, and concludes that such approaches not only do not often work, but, frequently, have the opposite effect. Authoritarian governments are quite adept at doing ‘just enough’ to appease their critics, while at the same time persisting in their repressive policies and practices. In this context, the task of all the actors, whether advocates, UN officials, or governments concerned with the promotion and protection of international human rights norms, is to adopt more nuanced forms of advocacy. This book not only contributes to the growing scholarly literature on accountability for mass atrocities, but offers important insights to policymakers and advocates. IDSS/ISA is very pleased to designate it as the winner of the Felicia Krishna Hensel Best Book Award.


– George Andreopoulos, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice and at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Director of the Center for International Human Rights at John Jay College.

IDSS BEST Book Award 2023

The winner of the 2023 Best Book Award is Frances S. Hasso for the monograph Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Frances Hasso’s thought-provoking study brings into sharp focus a less examined facet of Palestine’s history. Eschewing established readings of anticolonialism, colonialism, settler colonialism and national identity, the author critically examines the centrality of issues of reproduction, and infant and child death in the Palestinian colonial experience. The author challenges their treatment as side notes in narratives of the 1936-1939 Revolt and the 1948 Nakba, arguing that they constitute central reference points in any comprehensive understanding of that experience. More specifically, the author seeks to demonstrate how “racism and eugenics shaped British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine…informing their health policies, investments, and discourses.” Her examination is conducted with a variety of research tools (archival research, oral histories and interviews, among others) and informed by feminist readings of text and practices to provide us with new insights about authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. This is an important book that will influence future discussions of the dynamics that have shaped in the past and continue to frame the question of Palestine.

– George Andreopoulos, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice and at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Director of the Center for International Human Rights at John Jay College.

IDSS Best Book Award 2022

The winner of the 2022 Best Book Award is Isabella M. Weber, for her monograph How China Escaped Shock Therapy. The Market Reform Debate (Routledge, 2021).

Isabella Weber’s study explores a fascinating topic: China’s economic statecraft that contributed to its transformation from a socialist planned economy into one of the world’s most successful economies. The author presents a comprehensive account of the key debates among Chinese policymakers in the 1980s that led to the adoption of an ‘experimental gradualism.’ This approach enabled China to avoid the deleterious effects of shock therapy that marked with chaos and social dislocation Russia’s as well as several Eastern European countries’ transition to a market economy. In advancing her main arguments, the author draws on a wide array of documents and on interviews with participants in these critical debates. This is a study that skillfully combines political economy and economic history to provide an insightful and nuanced scholarly analysis into the making of the ‘other superpower.’ The IDSS/ISA is very pleased to award its Best Book Prize to Isabella Weber for her original perspective on one of the most important developments in modern world history.

– George Andreopoulos, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice and at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Director of the Center for International Human Rights at John Jay College.

IDSS Best Book Award 2021

The winner of the 2021 Best Book Award is Murad Idris, for his monograph War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2019).