Announcing the winners of the Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group Early-Career Researcher Paper Prize 2025
The Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group and the editorial team at Review of International Studies have chosen the winners of the Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group Early-Career Researcher Paper Prize 2025.
First, we want to thank all those who submitted their work. Collectively, the pool of submissions was of an exceptionally high quality - we learned so much from reading and engaging with each one.
A little about the prize
The prize is aimed at supporting CPD’s early-career members in the development of peer-reviewed work, while at the same time carving out space in International Studies to engage with the question of empire and coloniality as fundamental to the discipline. The winning papers were chosen by a panel nominated by the conveners of the Colonial Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group and the editors of Review of International Studies (RIS), a BISA journal. In addition to being invited to present their paper at the annual BISA conference (with fees generously covered by RIS), the prize winners will be mentored through the review process at RIS. This process will enable the desk-review to be waived, and the paper to be sent directly to external reviewers, who will make all final decisions about accepting the paper for publication.
Please join us at the 2025 annual conference in Belfast, for a special roundtable spotlighting our winners: 1.15pm on Friday 20 June in Grand 5, Europa Hotel.
Winner - Asad Zaidi, University of Westminster
“Pakistani contested worldmaking in international politics: The Afghan-Soviet War, Cold War counterinsurgency, and the struggles for decolonization”
This paper is a deeply important and creative archival intervention that offers alternative, Southern histories to theorise the tensions, contradictions, agency of Global South actors during the Cold War as well as their role in shaping world politics. By refusing hegemonic stories of global politics and challenging methodological nationalism pervasive in dominant IR scholarship, the article offers ‘Pakistani conflictual worldmaking’ as a novel conceptualisation to capture Pakistan’s support to imperial world order and the emergent anti-colonial and counter-hegemonic struggles. In so doing, the article examines Pakistan’s role in the Afghan war highlighting the limitations and contradictions of state-led decolonising projects and how these imperial-anti-imperial encounters continue to structure world politics. Adding to the wealth of emergent scholarship in critical IR and beyond that interrogates South-South colonial dynamics, the article foregrounds the agentive politics of Southern actors to point to the limits and contradictions of formal decolonisation processes, the coloniality of Southern actors and the complexities of postcolonial statehood.
Runner up - Lucy Rebecca Cannon, University of Warwick
"This Land, My sister, is a Woman’ – Understanding the role of Social Reproduction in Palestine”
Throughout this important paper, the author expands on the need to think with the ‘everyday’ as a central means of investigation when considering and desiring to capture the totality of Palestinian women’s labour. It draws upon significant empirical material, detailing how women navigate the need to resist under the threat of genocide, and how mothers need to provide spaces of care, growth and compassion for their children. It includes an important discussion of the notion of the drawing out Instafada (Haddad, Kareen Hayfaa) and how women have used social media to drawn attention to their daily experiences of suffering under genocide, mentioning specifically the work of Gazan journalist, Bisan Owda. Through drawing links between feminist social reproduction and settler colonialism, it highlights the role of social reproduction undertaken by Palestinian women through a specifically decolonial perspective. This recognises an inability to separate the forms and motivations for types of labour from the settler colonial logics which dictate the daily rhythms of life for Palestinians.
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash