Winners of the Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group Early-Career Researcher Paper Prize 2026 announced
BISA’s Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group and the editorial team at Review of International Studies have chosen the winners of the 2025/2026 CPD Paper Prize for Early Career Scholars.
Firstly, 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 convenors of the Colonial Postcolonial and Decolonial working group and the editors of Review of International Studies (RIS), a British International Studies Association 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 BISA’s 2026 annual conference in Brighton, for a special roundtable spotlighting our winners: Thursday 4 June 2026, from 1:15 to 2:45 in Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre.
Winner - Susy Williams, University of York
The Coloniality of Exploitation in Fast Fashion Manufacturing in the UK
This is an excellent and creative intervention, which is grounded in thoughtful primary research. The paper brings the colonial past to the very timely present through interrogating the way in which fast fashion manufacturing in the United Kingdom is enabled by colonial patterns of exploitation. The paper traces ‘sweating’ in the garment industry and the way in which it is endemic in the global North, and particularly through exploitation of feminised and racialised migrant garment workers in Leicester, and how it is tied to colonial patterns that are reproduced internally within the metropole. The paper adds a novel and empirically-grounded analysis of how coloniality manifests and travels through time, particularly in the metropole.
Runner up - Anand Sreekumar, University of Adelaide
An Indo-Pacific history from below? Kerala, the Indo-Pacific and the ocean as method
This paper challenges the Westphalian model of defined nation-states, and offers a bottom-up approach to analysing politics through an innovative methodology of looking at the ocean. This provides an important corrective to the top-down approach. It provides a crucial critique of Hindu nationalism through a reading of caste, and putting the ocean and the history of travel at the centre of the discussion. The paper provides a unique approach to thinking about identity and race through the ocean as method, and in doing so, provides a key critique of nationalism in a well-researched and innovative way. It recentres the people and the communities instead of the nation-state, focusing on their histories and stories of travel across oceans.
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