Global Development Section
Book Award

The International Studies Association (ISA) Global Development Studies (GDS) section is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the GDS Book Prize. Books should meet the goals of the section, including a scholarly concern with development and global justice working across a number of fields, for example, postcolonial studies, development studies, critical political economy, critical security studies, social and political theory, history, sociology, gender studies, and public policy.

General Information

Nominations must meet the Following Criteria

Book must be published in 2022-2023
Book must be a monograph (cannot be an edited volume)
Self-nominations are accepted; nominee and nominator must be current ISA members
Nominations are not accepted from publishers
The Nominator should write a 300-500 word justification to be sent to the GDS Book Award Committee Chair, Akta Rao, at gdsbookaward@gmail.com, by June 30th 2023.
The committee will, to the best of its ability, consider books written language other than English
Members currently holding any leadership positions in ISA are ineligible for the award

Prize

The recipient will receive a certificate and $500.

Selection Process

Nominee/nominator are responsible for getting the publisher to send a copy of the book of the committee members (see list below). In case of a non-English text, work with the Committee Chair and GDS to facilitate the necessary steps (cf. translation) for a fair inclusion of the text in the award process.
Deadline for nominations: Email Akta Rao at gdsbookaward@gmail.com by June 30th, 2023.
Deadline for receiving hard/physical copies of books by committee: August 30th, 2023. Soft copies accepted only under exceptional circumstances, particularly if the publisher is based in the Global South.

* By mid-July, the GDS Book Award Committee will reach out to selected candidates about where to send their books *

COMMITTEE

Akta Rao, The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (Chair)
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, The New School
Vinícius Tavares de Oliveira, PUC Minas Gerais
Lisa Tilley, SOAS, University of London
Rafael Bittencourt Rodrigues Lopes, Federal University of Goiás (UFG)
Shiera Malik, DePaul University

2023 WINNER

Rebecca Hall

*Refracted Economies* (University of Toronto Press, 2022) is a gendered analysis of the diamond mining industry in the Canadian sub arctic, and the experiences of the northern Indigenous communities upon whose lands these mines were established. Taking a decolonizing and feminist approach to political economy, the book centres on Indigenous women’s social reproduction labour and the ways in which caring labour tie together sites of (capitalist) work, home, and care. The fieldwork was conducted through community-based research in partnership with *The Native Women’s Association of the Northwest Territories* and draws upon documentary analysis, interviews, and talking circles.

2023 HONORABLE MENTIONS

Mohamed Sesay - Domination Through Law: Internationalization of Legal Norms in Postcolonial Africa

Domination through Law (Littlefield, 2021) develops a postcolonial critique of international rule of law to argue that legal norms and institutions transferred from the global center often perpetuate forms of domination by reinforcing structural, social, and cost-related barriers to justice in postconflict African states. Aimed at problematizing the benign characterizations of contemporary rule of law promotion, the book questions international efforts that disproportionately favor those who have been historically privileged by unequal socio-legal and economic structures at the expense of those who lack the resources to use the formal legal system. It also contends that externally supported rule of law development that stresses standardization, formalization, and centralization of legal structures in postcolonial Africa has only succeeded in entrenching a state-based system that is highly elitist, centralized, and designed for the application of English law.

Jayita Sarkar - Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War

Ploughshares and Swords (Cornell University Press, 2022) adopts a novel approach to studying global development by centring technopolitics and territoriality at the heart of nuclear infrastructures in the largest democracy in the world. Spanning across four decades of archive-based transnational history while making conceptual contributions to international studies of development, Ploughshares and Swords, sheds new light on India’s nuclear program, the making of the postcolonial nation-state, the remaking of borders and borderlands, and the contentious character of global development itself. The book shows why and how India’s leaders and middle classes tolerated the risks and costs of the program in the name of the nation. In doing so, it presents a complex and even a darker side of the development project of which the nuclear and space programs formed a cornerstone.