BISA 2026 prize winners announced
We're delighted to announce the winners of the 2026 BISA awards and prizes. Our annual awards recognise excellence and achievement through research and teaching in the field of International Studies, and are announced at our conference each year.
The winners are:
Distinguished Contribution Prize – Sir Adam Roberts
Susan Strange Best Book Prize – Patricia Owens - Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton University Press, 2025).
L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize – Samuel Singler - Outsourcing Crimmigration Control: Digital Borders, the IOM, and Biometric Statehood (Oxford University Press)
Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize – Raj Kaithwar - UnEarth Geopolitics as an Anthropocentric Assemblage: Territorialisation and Deterritorialization of Rivers at the India-East Pakistan Boundary (University of New South Wales, Canberra)
Best Article in the Review of International Studies (RIS) Prize – Thom Tyerman and Travis van Isacker - ‘Here there be monsters’: Confronting the (post)coloniality of Britain’s borders’ (RIS, Volume 51, Issue 3, May 2025, pp.409-429)
New Voices In Cultural Relations Prize - Megan Green - “We're a School of Sanctuary and what that means is, we could have a refugee family tomorrow, we will welcome them, we will treat them as equal.” An exploration of how Schools of Sanctuary support asylum-seeking and refugee pupils
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Prize – Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University London)
Working Group of the Year Prize – Environment and Climate Politics
Postgraduate Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize – Joint winners: Alba Priewe (University of Warwick) and Erin McNally (Lancaster University)
Early Career Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize – Tyler Girard (Purdue University)
Distinguished Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize – Felix Roesch (University of Sussex) and Emilia Heo(Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University)
Read on to find out more about each winner, see some honorable mentions, and what the judges said. Keep an eye on our social media to hear about each of the winners.
Distinguished Contribution Prize – Professor Sir Adam Roberts
Our Distinguished Contribution Prize recognises sustained contributions to the promotion of excellence in the discipline of International Studies over the course of a career.
The judges said:
"I think it is fair to say that we were very impressed with all of the nominees and were pleased that all three nominations were viable ones."
"We came to our decision to award the prize to Adam due to the strength of his contributions in research, engagement and impact, and leadership in international studies, in particular. We were impressed by his outstanding, sustained publication record and his established research expertise in international studies across several key areas including international theory, war studies, and area studies. Adam’s expertise in international law and armed conflict is clearly prized beyond the academy, particularly in the realm of policy-making, and we noted that his early contributions to engagement and impact were somewhat ahead of the curve. There was clear evidence of excellence in leadership in international studies too. Adam has served as the President of the British Academy, on the BISA Executive Committee, and on the editorial committee of the CUP-BISA series. Furthermore, in his capacity as the Oxford Montague Burton Chair, he used this role to make the case for formalising, and resourcing, teaching and research in international studies at the University. This has ensured that several generations of students and researchers have been able to learn about, and contribute to, the development of international studies."
Susan Strange Best Book Prize - Patricia Owens
The aim of this prize is to honour the work of Susan Strange, and to recognise outstanding current work being conducted in the discipline. This year’s prize was awarded to Patricia Owens for the book Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton University Press, 2025).
The judging panel said:
"A bold, fascinating, and genuinely revelatory work, Erasure is an original and significant monograph that will make a lasting contribution to the intellectual history of International Relations. Grounded in extensive archival research and drawing on rich new primary material, it restores the rightful place of the discipline’s forgotten female pioneers. Through superb writing and carefully crafted chapters, it engages and grips the reader, while incisively subverting the male-dominated narratives that have long shaped the discipline. This is a meticulously researched and very clearly, precisely, and compellingly written book that culminates in a striking conclusion, interrogating the gap between the magnitude of IR’s subject matter and its scholarship. Owens diagnoses that erasure lies at the heart of this disciplinary failure. Brilliant, engaging, and deeply significant, this is a landmark contribution."
The judges also awarded an honourable mention to Inken von Borzyskowski and Felicity Vabulas for Exit from International Organizations: Costly Negotiations for Institutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
They said on this book:
"This excellent book offers an exemplary and highly original account of withdrawal from international organisations, making a major contribution to the study of global governance. Built on extensive data collection and multi-archival research, it develops a unique dataset that underpins both its empirical findings and its theoretical innovations. The result is a clear, rigorous, and compelling analysis of the causal factors driving exits from international organisations. Challenging established orthodoxy, the book advances the central and persuasive argument that withdrawal is not merely a breakdown of cooperation but a costly strategic tool for negotiating institutional change. In doing so, it reveals that such exits carry significant and uneven consequences for states. Showcasing both methodological sophistication and analytical precision, this is an incisive, important, and field-shaping contribution."
L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize – Samuel Singler
The aim of the L.H.M. Ling prize is to honour Lily's work and to recognise outstanding early-career research in the discipline. This year’s prize was awarded to Samuel Singler for the book Outsourcing Crimmigration Control: Digital Borders, the IOM, and Biometric Statehood (Oxford University Press).
The judging panel said:
"Samuel Singler's book is a theoretically ambitious and empirically rich contribution to a timely and emerging field. The central case study on the IOM's biometric border management system MIDAS deployed in Nigeria, allows the author to explore a question that cuts against the grain of most critical border scholarship: why do Southern states actively request a system that seemingly serves Northern interests in curtailing migration? In doing so, the book elucidates the concept of 'crimmigration control' and the implications of technopolitics for the Global South more broadly, drawing on STS and decolonial approaches to the intersection of technology, borders, politics, and human agency. The theoretical framework is original and carefully developed. The author reframes Global South governments from passive objects of surveillance into strategic actors pursuing their own goals, breaks down entrenched binaries, and explores the interplay between different epistemologies and governance arrangements. The space given to developing these theoretical foundations is impressive, and the book's engagement with postcolonial hierarchies positions it to shape future thinking and research in the field. The empirical work is also of a high standard, drawing on a wide range of primary sources, both publicly available and internal, alongside 28 interviews and non-participant observation conducted while stationed in IOM field offices in Abuja. The qualitative research approach is well suited to the questions posed and to the broader aim of democratising and decolonising the field of study. In addition, the reflections on positionality and knowledge production are honest and reflective. overall, while the book is a single case study, its significance extends well beyond the immediate case and constitutes a very impressive piece of research."
Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize – Raj Kaithwar
The Michael Nicholson thesis jury agreed that this year’s award should go to Raj Kaithwar for UnEarth Geopolitics as an Anthropocentric Assemblage: Territorialisation and Deterritorialization of Rivers at the India-East Pakistan Boundary.
Of Raj’s dissertation the judges said:
"A highly original and ambitious thesis. Deploying an innovative conceptual framework utilising assemblage theory and the concept of deterritorialization, and drawing on extensive multi-sited archival research, it shows convincingly how the environment needs to be considered as an active agent in core notions of sovereignty and geopolitics. A very significant contribution to work on borders, critical geopolitics and more-than-human IR in ways which are of central importance to present debates in the discipline. Demonstrating theoretical mastery, methodological precision and empirical richness, it is beautifully written and highly rigorous throughout. An enormously impressive and commendable piece of work."
The judges also awarded honourable mentions to
- Lucia Frigo - Euro-British Foreign Intelligence Cooperation through Brexit and Russia's Invasion of Ukraine: Trust and Network Power in times of Crisis.
- Christopher Choong Weng Wai - The Everyday Political Economy of Raced Capitalism in Malysia: Reinscribing Malay Women's Lives, Labour and Households.
On Lucia’s thesis the panel said:
"A very impressive piece of work that integrates legal and IR perspectives to provide considerable new insights on an evolving subject, generating new empirical data and extending current knowledge in important ways. The thesis is original in its application of network analysis to illuminate the evolution of Euro-British intelligence cooperation through a period of significant disruption and crisis. It advances new theoretical and empirical insights for intelligence studies and contributes to ongoing debates on major themes in IR, including trust, informality and accountability. The thesis is beautifully written and offers important new lines of inquiry for the sub-discipline and discipline more widely."
On Christopher’s thesis the panel said:
"A very impressive and original piece of work. The thesis innovates in several areas, including the connecting of UCD and feminist IP, as well as the reading of Malaysia as a site of raced capitalism influenced by different imperial projects. Highly erudite and wide-ranging in terms of the interdisciplinary literatures and inspirations on which it draws and addressing an empirical case that has not been widely studied to date. An excellent and thought-provoking contribution to IPE overall. Conceptually and methodologically ambitious, and empirically rich. Very well written and convincingly argued. The synthesis of different registers of analysis is particularly impressive."
Best Article in the Review of International Studies (RIS) Prize – Thom Tyerman and Travis Van Isacker
This Prize is awarded annually by the editorial advisory board of our journal Review of International Studies (RIS). It is awarded for the best article published in the previous year's volume of the journal. This year the board chose Thom Tyerman and Travis Van Isacker’s ‘Here there be monsters’: Confronting the (post)coloniality of Britain’s borders’ (RIS, Volume 51, Issue 3, May 2025, pp.409-429)
The judges noted:
"This timely and excellently imaginative article makes a significant contribution to the ways in which increasingly securitized societies imagine endlessly racialized migrants as beasts, animals, and zombies, while simultaneously sanctioning and paying fealty to monstrous regimes of surveillance and carcerality that attempt to detain, contain, and deport them. The brilliance of the article shines in its visceral reimagining and re-depiction of the canonical Leviathan of Hobbes (top-down and awe-inducing) as the ‘Border Leviathan’: a fleshy, tentacled, and headless Lovecroftian monstrosity that is diffuse across networks, dimensions, and bodies of racialized violence…reaching its arms to every corner of our mundane lives. The article sets up the Border Leviathan as a metaphor to interrogate both our complicity in such regimes of power, as well as open space for imaginative refusals and resistances that can be enacted against it. The monster, in the article, emerges both as the decentralized body of the border-sovereign, but also a figure of radical, transgressive, and hybrid other-ness that can become a figurative tool to re-imagine ourselves for a potentially abolitionist future. In an era where migration flows are the norm, states – not just the UK – are complicit in the monsterization of migrants, the article forces readers to confront the reality that the rules-based order that we have come to know is crumbling, and that it is high time that we imagine a new and emerging way of organizing international life."
New Voices In Cultural Relations Prize - Megan Green (University of Leeds)
This joint BISA and British Council prize is for a Master’s dissertation which provides new scholarly insight and/or offers a new policy direction that makes an original contribution to international relations.
The judges said:
"This is an outstanding dissertation that draws upon extensive original primary research. Focused on Schools of Sanctuary, it offers timely and important insights with real potential to inform practice and shift attitudes towards refugee children’s education. The work is both empirically rich and, at points, genuinely moving, telling a rare story of hope. With further development of its theoretical framing for publication, this research has the potential to make a major contribution. Overall, it stands out as an exceptional and impactful piece of MA scholarship."
The judges also awarded Special Commendation to:
- Anna Kama Ligęzowska (Loughborough University London)
- Elina Kurylova (Anglia Ruskin University)
You can find out more about this prize and the winners in a separate news story.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion prize - Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University London)
The judges comments were:
"Niharika Pandit’s work reflects the profile of an early career scholar who has already made significant contributions to the field of EDI in international studies, within and beyond BISA and academia. We are especially pleased to recognize this nominee’s range of community building initiatives and in her role as BISA Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) working group convenor. Additional efforts she has engaged in include co-launching the Pluriversal Feminisms and Multispecies Justice: Thinking with/from the Global South, an experimental community-building initiative. Public engagement is also reflected in her work with Tower Hamlets Women’s Network, a group of over 170 ethnically diverse women, more than 75% of whom are from global majority background. Her EDI commitments are also evident in her award-winning research which informs her forthcoming book with Oxford University Press ‘Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir’."
Postgraduate Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize joint winners: Alba Priewe (University of Warwick) and Erin McNally (Lancaster University)
This prize recognises postgraduate students who have contributed to the positive learning experience of students in International Studies.
About Alba, the judging panel said:
"Alba’s pedagogical practice stands out for her clear and deliberate efforts to create an inclusive learning environment where students feel supported, challenged, and able to develop their own critical arguments in the classroom. Her teaching excellence is enthusiastically reflected in student testimonies, in which her teaching is described as highly engaging, interesting, as well as accessible. Alba’s nomination also stands out for her strong contributions to departmental training and pedagogical culture, and her role as a Graduate Teaching Assistant Representative. Her practice reflects a particularly strong post-graduate contribution to teaching in international studies."
And about Erin:
"Erin’s teaching across a range of IR modules makes exemplary use of creative and innovative strategies, including board games, card games, video games and simulation exercises. Erin’s students are extremely appreciative of her efforts to make politics and international studies teaching fun and inclusive. They describe her as a ‘fantastic teacher, very approachable, and down-to-earth’. Beyond the classroom, Erin’s support for students on placements and internships, as well as her role as departmental representative for Associate Lecturers reflects her wider contribution to the discipline."
Early Career Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize -Tyler Girard (Purdue University)
The aim of this annual award is to recognise those early-career academics, or teams of academics, who have contributed to the positive learning experience of students in International Studies.
The judging panel noted:
"Tyler’s nomination reflects an excellent and wide ranging contribution to international studies pedagogy. His use of innovative teaching methods such as simulation exercises, and broad contribution across numerous modules is indicative of his contribution. The judging panel were particularly impressed by Tyler’s development of study abroad international partnerships with the University of Glasgow, his work as an advisor on Purdue’s Model UN club and Pi Sigma Alpha, and chair of dissertation committees. Tyler’s nomination by Purdue also praises his commitment to gender equity within his department. His contributions exemplify an outstanding early career pedagogical profile and the panel were pleased to endorse his nomination for this award."
They also awarded an honourable mention to William Plowright.
"The panel highly commended William Plowright’s nomination and deemed it especially worthy of an honorable mention in the early career teaching award category. William’s innovative and sensitive use of trauma-informed pedagogy and experiential methods such as simulation and role-play were highly praised by a diverse and international group of students, many of whom had experienced conflict and trauma. William’s development of research-led practice based on contacts in conflict and humanitarian sectors demonstrates an excellent early career contribution to teaching in international studies."
Distinguished Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize -Felix Roesch and Emilia Heo
The aim of this annual award is to recognise established academics, or teams of academics, who have contributed to the positive learning experience of students in International Studies.
The judges said:
"The joint award for distinguished teaching excellence in international studies recognises the sustained international teaching collaboration between Felix Roesch of University of Sussex and Emilia Heo of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. Both are pushing the boundaries of innovative teaching through performance, dance, and artistic practice in IR teaching in relation to peace and conflict resolution. A wide body of evidence including student feedback scores, testimonials, and peer recommendations supports the strong impact that Felix and Emilia are having on student learning and engagement in the discipline. The judging panel were particularly keen to highlight Felix’s and Emilia’s joint commitment to publishing their pedagogical work in a way that enables colleagues to learn from their innovative methods, thereby extending the reach and impact of their work widely within the field of international studies. Their leading contribution to teaching in international studies deserves recognition for a distinguished contribution award."
Working Group of the Year – Environment and Climate Politics
Working groups are at the heart of BISA and directly contribute to the development of International Studies. All conveners are volunteers and hope this prize helps to recognise and celebrate their achievements.
The judges said of the Environment and Climate Politics Working Group:
"We think that they have demonstrated the most consistency in terms of engagement and activities and that they have had a strong online presence that positively contributes to their, and BISA’s, visibility. We also think they managed to strike a good balance between events targeted at those with a major interest in the field, and ones to engage BISA’s wider membership. In the round, we think their contributions this year have aligned very well with BISA’s aims therefore."
They also gave a or special mention to Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group who, despite not receiving a formal nomination, we want to recognise for the commitment shown by the conveners of this working group – David, Nancy and Samuel - to turning the group around over the past two years. They are now one of the most active groups and have worked hard to increase the visibility of both the group and of BISA.
Working group prizes
Some of our working groups have prizes for their group and we were delighted to have the Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group presenting their Early-Career Researcher Paper Prize, and the Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group presenting their group prize. Find out more on the link below.
Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group Early-Career Researcher Paper Prize