Winners – The Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award
2025
Winner:
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Citation: This path-breaking book reshapes our understanding of refugee regimes by revealing how the Ottoman Empire, long before the 20th-century frameworks of the League of Nations and the United Nations, developed a sophisticated system of protections for Muslim refugees between the 1850s and World War I. Magisterial in scope with a storyteller’s eye for detail, Empire of Refugees powerfully challenges conventional timelines in global history and migration studies, while also offering a fresh perspective on the Ottoman Empire’s collapse: refugee resettlement, the author argues, simultaneously strengthened imperial control in the outlying areas of the Levant and Anatolia while accelerating the collapse of the empire in the Balkans due to mismanagement of resettlement. Equally compelling is the book’s contribution to Russian and East European Studies, where it illuminates how Imperial Russia used migration policies to entrench its authority in the North Caucasus. With striking insight into the settler colonial dynamics that shaped the modern Middle East, this magnificent work offers a timely historical lens on the roots of displacement, resettlement, and resistance—one with urgent relevance today.
Honorable Mention:
Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson, Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press, 2024).
Citation:
Made in China is a bold and compelling reinterpretation of how China’s integration into global capitalism began not with Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms, but much earlier—during the late Mao era. Through a richly layered analysis of the intertwined transformations in both Chinese policy and American capitalism, the book reveals how cultural rebranding, diplomatic overtures, and economic realignments from the late 1960s onward laid the groundwork for a new global order. With sharp insight, it shows how U.S. business interests and Chinese state policy converged around a shared vision of China—not as a market of 400 million customers, but 800 million workers—reshaping trade, labor, and geopolitics in ways that have defined our world today. Far from a nostalgic defense of lost manufacturing jobs, this book is a necessary call to confront the transnational forces driving globalization and to rethink whose interests they truly serve.
2024
Winner:
Sheila Miyoshi Jager, The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2023).
Honorable mention:
Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2023).
Honorable mention:
Natasha Wheatley, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2023).
2023
Winner: Jonathan Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2022)
Honorable mention: Jonathan Kirshner, An Unwritten Future: Realism, Uncertainty, and World Politics (Princeton University Press, 2022).
Honorable mention: Ayşe Zarakol, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
2022
Winner: Jeff D. Colgan, Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Honorable mention: Sinja Graf, The Humanity of Universal Crime: Inclusion, Inequality, and Intervention in International Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Honorable mention: Rachel Elizabeth Whitlark, All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation (Cornell University Press, 2021).
2021 Co-Winners
Kyle Lascurettes, Orders of Exclusion: Great Powers and the Strategic Sources of Foundational Rules in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Don Levin, Meddling at the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Honorable Mention: Lora Anne Viola, The Closure of the International System (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
2020 Co-Winners
Ahmet Kuru, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Jelena Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance After Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019)
2019
Arjun Chowdhury, The Myth of International Order: Why Weak States Persist and Alternatives to the State Fade Away (Oxford University Press, 2018)
2018
Catherine Lu, Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
2017
Winner: Rosella Cappella Zielinski, How States Pay for Wars (Cornell University Press, 2016).
Honorable mention: Debra Thompson, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
2016 (joint winners)
Andrew Phillips and Jason Sharman, International Order in Diversity: War, Trade and Rule in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Ronald Krebs, Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
2015
Eric Grynaviski, Constructive Illusions: Rethinking the Origins of International Cooperation (Cornell University Press, 2014)
2014
Winner: Adria K. Lawrence, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Honorable mention: Jennifer Mitzen, Power in Concert: The Nineteenth- Century Origins of Global Governance (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
2013
Winner: Ted Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958 (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Honorable mention: Kristen Renwick Monroe, Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide: Identity and Moral Choice (Princeton University Press, 2012)
2012
Elizabeth N. Saunders, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Cornell University Press, 2011)
2011
James Mahoney, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
2010
Patrick J. McDonald, The Invisible Hand of Peace: Capitalism, The War Machine, and International Relations Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
2009
Winner: Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Honorable mention: George Gavrilis, The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
2008 (joint winners)
Etel Solingen, Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and The Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2007)
Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton University Press, 2007)
2007
Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press,2006)
2006
Winner: Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Honorable mention: Daryl G. Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Evaluate Military Threats (Cornell University Press, 2005)
2005
Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery (Cornell University Press, 2004)
2004
Richard Samuel, Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2003)
2003 (joint winners)
Neta Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Dorothy Jones, Toward a Just World: The Critical Years in the Search for International Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
2002
John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton University Press, 2001)
2001
Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 1999)