Announcing the results of CPD's third annual Early-Career Researcher Paper Prize
The Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group and the editorial team at Review of International Studies have chosen the winners of the 2023/2024 CPD Paper Prize for Early Career Scholars.
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.
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), all three 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.
Please join us at BISA’s 2024 annual conference in Birmingham, for a special roundtable spotlighting our winners: Wednesday 5 June, 10:45 - 12:15 (Jane How, Symphony Hall)
Winner: Jamal Nabulsi (University of Queensland)
Affective Sovereignty: A decolonial politics of emotion in Palestine
Jamal Nabulsi’s article is eloquently written, theoretically complex and ethnographically grounded. It takes up a key theme in CPD’s conceptual repertoire, as to what sovereignty can embody through decolonial and Indigenous lenses. It does so at multiple registers: first, by refusing the fragmented framing of Palestinian lives and lands; second, by anchoring its central arguments in Palestinians’ ongoing and unending feelings of belonging to and longing for Palestine; third by working through how these constellations of feelings constitute what the author calls affective sovereignty; and finally, as the paper delves deeply into Palestinian music, art and culture as expressions of belonging, unity and sovereignty, it comes to the powerful conclusion, that sovereignty is sustained, affirmed and reproduced in part through feeling. In its foundational conversations intersecting the politics of emotion with Indigenous politics, it offers key ways forward for both the more material engagements of decolonial work and for those IR scholars attempting to grapple with the politics of emotion. We were captivated by this ambitious and powerful contribution that centres Palestine and Palestinian artistic production.
Runners up
Alice Engelhard (LSE)
Decolonisation and the displacement of the Chagos Islanders
The paper is a rigorous exploration of the archival legacies of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s interventions in the legitimisation of their displacement of the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, in order to set up a US military base on the islands. But in its excavations of and against the grain of the archive (with the help of key postcolonial and decolonial scholarship), it evolves into an incredible intervention into the core questions that shape CPD’s work. It contributes to essential debates on the categories of migrants, indigeneity and political belonging, while making visible the ongoing role of empire within an ‘international’ order, and the way that this coloniality is obscured through claims to - as Alice Engelhard puts it - ‘national sedentarism’ and ‘territorial fixity’. We were impressed with the paper’s depth and the granular way it engages with its source material.
Sara Wong (LSE)
Towards an Anticolonial Aesthetic Politics: Surrealist Praxis & Epistemic Refusal
The paper offers a conceptually rich and beautifully written engagement with aesthetic production, surrealism and ‘the international order’, through the lens of anticolonial thought. Its originality is immediately apparent, as Sara Wong takes us on a journey against the normally bounded European sites of cultural movements, to the work of Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire and René Ménil, and other Caribbean Surrealist writers that inspired her thinking. She then grounds her analysis of anticolonial surrealism - art that is, as she puts it ‘beyond a movement, a selection of methods, a genre or a set of ideas’ - in an ethnographic engagement with the artistic interventions of an exiled Myanmar artist. In her work, we find at stake so much more than a discussion of artistic methods and politics; she unravels surrealist praxis as a form of epistemic refusal, one which, as she claims “manifests both politically and aesthetically, thus allowing for a wider spectrum of what constitutes politics”. We were truly inspired by the conceptual leap taken in this paper.