Susan Strange Best Book Prize

We’re pleased to award the Susan Strange Book Prize for an outstanding book published in any field of International Studies during the course of the 12 months up to 31 December 2020. The aim of the Prize is to honour the work of Susan Strange and to recognise outstanding current work being conducted in the discipline.

Susan was, and remains, one of the most influential figures in British International Studies. She held several key academic posts including the Montague Burton Chair in International Relations at LSE. Susan was a founding member of BISA and our first Treasurer. She was also the first female President of the International Studies Association (ISA) in 1995.

Eligibility

• Books may be nominated by publishers, convenors of BISA working groups, or Heads of Department. Self-nominations are not permitted.
• Nominators are encouraged to respect the spirit of the prize and nominate only books of the highest quality. Nominations must be made online, accompanied by a short statement of the reason for nomination, including a summary of the originality and contribution of the book. You should also detail its actual or potential impact on the field and the standard of scholarship it exhibits. 
• A maximum of three books can be nominated by the same publisher. We ask you to undertake an internal selection process and only nominate books for consideration that will be considered original, make a significant contribution to the field and that can be regarded as innovative and excellent. Please ensure you detail why the book meets these criteria, and don’t just provide a dust cover description of the scope of the book.
• Nominated books must be in the field of international studies.
• The author(s) need not hold BISA membership. 
• The nominated book must have been published between 1 January and 31 December 2020. Where a book is published later in the year but carries a 2020 publication date, authors may be required to provide proof that the book was published in the calendar year 2020.

Nominations are currently closed. The next cycle will open early in 2022.

The Prize will be judged by a committee appointed by the Vice-Chair of BISA, acting on behalf of the Executive Committee.

The judging process

1. Online nominations are received and reviewed by the BISA Research Sub-Committee. At this  stage decisions are made on the basis of the online nomination forms, and no copies of the book are required.
2. Please ensure you make the case for the nomination (why should it be regarded as Excellent, Innovative, High Academic Quality etc) and please do not just describe the book subject area or provide the dust cover notes.
3. The Research Sub-Committee produces a long-list of a maximum of 10 nominated books, which is passed to the appointed panel of judges.
4. Authors will be contacted and asked to arrange for three review copies of the book to be made available to the members of the panel. Where possible, pdf or e-book versions would be welcome in addition to a hard copy. Books should be sent directly to the members of the Prize panel by the authors or publishers acting on their behalf. It is the responsibility of the authors to arrange for the books to be provided. If copies of a long-listed book are not received by the panel by the date stipulated, the nomination will be excluded from consideration.
5. The prize will be judged by a committee appointed by the Vice-Chair of BISA, acting on behalf of the Executive Committee.
6. The Prize will be awarded at our annual conference. We reserve the right not to make an award in any particular year.

Got a question?

Enquiries about the prize and the process of nomination should be sent to our Research Sub-Committee chair, Professor Ruth Blakeley: r.blakeley@sheffield.ac.uk 

Past recipients

• 2021 Nicola Pratt: Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, University of California Press
• 2020 Rauna Kuokkanen: Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance and Gender
• 2019 Alasdair Cochrane: Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice
• 2018 Professor Laura Shepherd (University of Sydney): Gender, UN Peacebuilding and The Politics of Space and Dr Sean Molloy (University of Kent): Kant's International Relations: The Political Theology Of Perpetual Peace
• 2017 Dr Emma Hutchison (University of Queensland): Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after Trauma
• 2016 Professor Patricia Owens (University of Sussex): Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social
• 2015 Associate Professor Rebecca Adler-Nissen (University of Copenhagen): Opting Out of the European Union: Diplomacy, Sovereignty and European Integration
• 2014 Professor Christian Reus-Smit (University of Queensland): Individual Rights and the Making of the International System
• 2013 Dr Laleh Khalili (SOAS, University of London): Time in the shadows: confinement in counterinsurgencies
• 2012 Associate Professor Dan Breznitz and Michael Murphree (Georgia Instiute of Technology): Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China
• 2011 No award made
• 2010 inaugural prize Richard Ned Lebow (Dartmouth College, USA): A Cultural Theory of International Relations