L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize 2026 shortlist announced
We are excited to announce the shortlist for the 2026 L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize, celebrating innovative and boundary-pushing scholarship in International Studies.
This year’s shortlist reflects the intellectual diversity and critical engagement that defined the work of L.H.M. Ling, recognising books that challenge dominant paradigms, amplify marginalised perspectives, and reshape the discipline. Congratulations to all shortlisted authors!
The shortlisted books (listed in alphabetical order) are:
Batsani-Ncube, I. (2025) China and African Parliaments. Oxford University Press.
Innocent Batsani-Ncube's China and African Parliaments is the first book to systematically examine China's expanding influence in African legislatures, using parliament buildings as a novel lens through which to understand China–Africa relations. Drawing on eight months of mixed-method fieldwork in Lesotho, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, including direct access to all three Chinese-financed buildings, interviews with political and civil society elites, and focus groups with ordinary citizens, Batsani-Ncube advances a ground-breaking argument that China's donation of parliament buildings represents a strategic effort to cultivate long-term institutional influence. The book also makes a significant theoretical contribution by developing the concept of African legislative institutionalisation in dialogue with these Chinese government-funded structures, offering new frameworks for understanding representative politics across the continent.
Dolan-Evans, E. (2025) Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine. Bristol University Press.
Elliot Dolan-Evans' Making War Safe for Capitalism offers a bold and timely critical political economy analysis of how international financial institutions operate in the midst of active conflict. Using Ukraine during the War in Donbas as a detailed case study, the book examines the World Bank and IMF's economic restructuring programmes in the agriculture, gas, and pension sectors, laying bare the human cost of neoliberal reform for conflict-affected communities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Ukraine, Dolan-Evans brings an interdisciplinary perspective that fuses legal analysis with political economy, revealing how the drive to 'de-risk' war environments for transnational investors frequently comes at the expense of the most vulnerable. The book is an essential contribution to scholarship on war, capitalism, and global development.
Kilicoglu, Z. (2025) Deconstructing Refugee Women's Empowerment: A Comparative Approach to British and French Aid Structures. Routledge.
Zeynep Kilicoglu's Deconstructing Refugee Women's Empowerment critically examines how self-identified feminist and women's organisations in the asylum and humanitarian sectors in the United Kingdom and France conceptualise and operationalise refugee women's empowerment. Adopting a feminist, intersectional, and postcolonial framework, the book interrogates the co-optation of empowerment by neoliberal development agendas and the persistence of a 'vulnerability versus empowerment' dichotomy in aid structures. Yet Kilicoglu also surfaces more promising approaches, exploring how organisations that prioritise women refugees' political participation, visibility, and authorship can support genuine agency, acknowledging refugees as autonomous political actors, rather than passive recipients of humanitarian aid. This nuanced comparative analysis makes a vital contribution to the fields of forced migration, gender studies, and postcolonial theory.
Nguyen, M. (2025) Small Revolutionaries: Participation of Children and Youth in the Vietnam War. Cornell University Press.
Mai Anh Nguyen's Small Revolutionaries is a pioneering study of young Vietnamese people who participated in the communist revolutionary struggle against the United States and its South Vietnamese allies between 1955 and 1975. Drawing on life history interviews and archival research, Nguyen traces the forces that shaped young recruits' decisions to enlist, structured their wartime experiences (from intelligence gathering and road construction to camp maintenance and medical care), and impacted their reintegration into postwar society. The book illuminates the social order of the time, showing how values of family loyalty, collectivism, and communist ideology were internalised by children and youth before and during the conflict. In recovering these voices, Nguyen challenges dominant narratives of children as mere victims of war, repositioning them as active, politically engaged, and morally complex subjects of global politics.
Singler, S. (2025) Outsourcing Crimmigration Control: Digital Borders, the IOM, and Biometric Statehood. Oxford University Press.
Samuel Singler's Outsourcing Crimmigration Control offers a rigorous and unsettling account of how migration control has become entangled with criminal justice logics through digital technologies and the growing role of international organisations. Focusing on the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and its deployment of biometric identification systems, the book interrogates how digital borders are constructed and normalised, and what this means for state sovereignty, postcolonial hierarchies, and the rights of migrants. Singler develops the original concept of 'biometric statehood' to capture how states increasingly exercise power and legitimacy through digital infrastructures outsourced to non-state actors. This theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded work makes a significant contribution to critical migration studies, international organisation theory, and the emerging field of digital borders scholarship.
The winner will be announced at our annual conference in Brighton 3-5 June 2026. Register now.
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