Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award
For an outstanding Political Science dissertation finished within the previous year of the APSA Meeting, which exemplifies the commitment to use scholarship in the struggle to make the study of political science relevant to building a more democratic and egalitarian economic, social, and political order.
2026 Nomination Deadline: April 1st, 2026
Committee: Ricardo Vega León and Dan Jacobs
Contact: Ricardo Vega León (Chair) rvegaleo@calpoly.edu
Nominations must be made in writing to the Committee Chair, Ricardo Vega León (rvegaleo@calpoly.edu), by a member of the dissertation committee or a scholar with relevant knowledge of the dissertation, and all committee members must receive a copy by April 1st in order to be eligible for consideration.
2025 Recipient: Ricardo Esteban Vega León
“Capitalist Abolitionism: Racial Capitalism After the End of Slavery”
Ricardo Esteban Vega León, in his dissertation, “Capitalist Abolitionism: Racial Capitalism After the End of Slavery,” examines the legacies of liberal ideologies of empire and anti-slavery across imperial spaces in the Americas and the Caribbean. In this important work, Vega León argues that the end of enslavement wasn’t the end of plantation or racial capitalism, but rather, furthered its globalization through the extra-economic coercive control over workers of various races.
Vega León contributes to the literature on racial capitalism by examining a corpus of liberal thinkers beyond the typical canon. He develops a conception of capitalist abolitionism to explain how the political-economic critiques of enslaved labor and emancipation projects of J.E. Cairnes, Harriet Martineau, Herman Merivale, José Antonio Saco, Adam Smith, and Alexis de Tocqueville ideologically and materially reproduced dynamics of racial capitalism. He also examines liberal political economists’ subjection of multiple groups of racialized workers, including Black, Chinese, Indian, and white laborers. To create a free labor force in the British and French Caribbean, Cuba, and the U.S. South, Vega León argues, capitalist abolitionists sought to keep workers of all races separate from the land so as to force them to earn their sustenance by continuing to work for planters in exchange for low wages, and to compel freed women to comply with a gendered division of reproductive labor. Crucially, Vega León identifies the role of state power and ideologies of private property and free labor in these processes of post-emancipation primitive accumulation, resulting in the dispossession and coercive exploitation of formerly enslaved laborers.
Vega León relates this historical and ideological work to contemporary debates among libertarian thinkers and questions of historiography and cultural memory, articulating how the relationship between liberalism and enslavement reverberates in the present. Contemporary libertarian thinkers proclaim that liberalism is inherently anti-slavery, but this work details the limits and tensions within liberal anti-slavery thought and politics. In all, Vega León’s work is critically oriented, historically rigorous, and with contemporary import, making it well-suited for the Bronner Award.
Past Recipients
2024: Be Stone, The City University of New York
2023: Candice Travis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2022: Lahoma Thomas, Toronto Metropolitan University
2021: Matt York, University College Cork
2020: Lucas Pinheiro, University of Chicago
“Factories of Modernity: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Racial Politics of Historical Capitalism,” University of Chicago, 2019
2019: Igor Shoikhedbrod, University of Toronto
“Rights Discourse and Economic Domination: Thinking Beyond the Narrow Horizon of Liberal Justice,” University of Toronto, 2018
2018: Rafael Khachaturian, Indiana University
“Discipline, Knowledge, and Critique: Marxist Theory and the Revival of the State in American Political Science, 1968-1989.” Indiana University, 2017
2017: Kevin Funk, Spring Hill College
“Between National Attachments, Rooted Transnationalism, and Borderless Utopias: Searching for Imagined Communities in Latin America’s Booming Economic Relations with the Arab World.” University of Florida, 2016
2016: Dean Snyder, Antioch College
“Commercial Capital and the Political Economy of Agricultural Overproduction.” Syracuse University, 2015