Shortlist: International Affairs Early Career Prize 2024
The International Affairs team is pleased to announce the four articles shortlisted for our Early Career Prize 2024.
In 2017, the editorial team at International Affairs launched the Early Career Prize to celebrate research published in the journal by authors who have less than seven years of experience in the field of International Relations post-PhD. After a rigorous selection process, we are pleased to announce the four articles which have made our shortlist for the 2024 prize.
Why?
It has rarely been harder to launch a career in academia. Expectations currently placed on PhD students and post-doctoral researchers regarding teaching, course administration, outreach and, of course, research, have been well documented.
In this context, we believe it is important to celebrate outstanding research produced by early career researchers. While the seniority of an author is not taken into account during the International Affairs editorial process, looking back at the high quality articles by early career academics has been an immensely rewarding exercise.
When will the winner be announced?
The winner will be announced during ISA’s Annual Convention 2024 in April. If you will be attending ISA this year, then we would be delighted to see you there. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to find out more.
The shortlist
The following articles have been shortlisted by the members of our editorial board. They are listed in order of the issue in which they were published.
1. Coding protection: ‘cyber humanitarian interventions’ for preventing mass atrocities
Rhiannon Neilsen
Abstract: In the contemporary digital age, mass atrocity crimes are increasingly promoted and organized online. Social media, encrypted chatrooms and messaging apps have been employed (by regimes and non-state actors alike) to stoke racial and political division, recruit sympathizers and facilitate atrocities. At the same time, there is increasing evidence of the power and promise of offensive cyberspace operations in conflict. Despite the parallel attention afforded to atrocity prevention and cyber operations (respectively), the overlap between these two scholarly investigations is thin. In fact, almost no attention has been afforded to the question of whether proactive cyberspace operations might be used for human protection purposes — specifically, to prevent genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. In this article, I introduce the concept of ‘cyber humanitarian interventions’ — the use of sophisticated cyber operations to frustrate perpetrators’ means and motivations for mass atrocities — as a new tool in the atrocity prevention toolbox. This article therefore seeks to initiate a research agenda that considers how cyber humanitarian interventions could be used for human protection in the twenty-first century. Such an investigation is particularly timely and policy relevant, as international responses to violence have been mixed, and — in the absence of political will for costly armed military interventions — many atrocities continue unabated.
Read the full article here.
2. The authoritarian narrator: China’s power projection and its reception in the Gulf
Julia Gurol
Abstract: This article argues that transregional communication mechanisms and the diffusion of narratives are important co-drivers towards autocratization. Offering a look beyond the ‘material’ in the study of global authoritarianism, it makes two conceptual arguments. It shows show transregional authoritarian practices are often discursively reinforced. Moreover, it demonstrates how narratives and their transregional diffusion are a form of authoritarian image management and a tool for fostering authoritarian stability. Departing from the basic assumption of authoritarian diffusion, the article is guided by two questions: which narratives of supremacy are used by the Chinese government in the context of the pandemic? And how are these narratives received, reproduced and contested in the Gulf? Based on a qualitative analysis of more than 3,000 media outlets (March–May 2020) from China and the Gulf region, the article shows how China strategically promotes authoritarian narratives regarding its international role, by telling stories of supremacy and heroism and by narratively conjuring a new world order. Moreover, it shows how the Chinese narratives are diffused to Iran, Saudi-Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar and depicts the different patterns of reception, reproduction and contestation.
Read the full article here.
3. Reinscribing global hierarchies: COVID–19, racial capitalism and the liberal international order
Andreas Papamichail
Abstract: The COVID–19 pandemic led to debates within International Relations (IR) as to the extent to which it would cause a rupture in the so-called liberal international order (LIO). This article is concerned with why such a rupture did not occur and draws on theories of racial capitalism to answer this question. It explores the political economy of three dynamics of the global response to the pandemic — lockdowns, border controls and vaccine distribution — and argues that rather than causing a rupture, COVID–19 has reinscribed various domestic and global racial hierarchies. The global divisions of labour and hierarchies of expendability that manifested in the unequal burdens of COVID–19; the border policies that both included and excluded based on racialized notions of who carries disease and the necessity of keeping capital in circulation; and the intellectual property regime and profit motives of pharmaceutical companies that led to inequitable vaccine distribution, are all intimately linked with key ideational and material institutions of the LIO. By drawing theories of racial capitalism into the IR literature on global health, the article points to the need for domestic and global health policy to address the deep-rooted racial inequities that characterized the COVID–19 pandemic ahead of future disease outbreaks.
Read the full article here.
4. Singapore’s conception of the liberal international order as a small state
Dylan M H Loh
Abstract: The liberal international order (LIO) is undergoing significant challenges, and this has given rise to debates about its purported decline. In this context, most studies of the LIO focus on major powers with little attention paid to small states’ conceptualizations of the LIO despite its ubiquity in international life. Focusing on the Singaporean case as a small state, it asks the question: how does Singapore conceptualize the LIO and what are the effects of this conceptualization? Through a mixed-method thematic analysis of 192 parliamentary replies, media interviews and United Nations speeches by Singaporean officials between 2000 to 2022, I find Singapore accepting and defending the existing international order in two main ways: demonstrating respect for international law and the UN Charter, and supporting economic liberalism. Meanwhile, Singapore is contesting the universality of liberal democracy as it sees such discourse as a rebuke to its single-party dominant governance model. This perception of the LIO, in turn, informs Singapore’s order-maintaining, order-modifying and order-contesting practices: it seeks to not only protect, but also to modify the LIO — through institutional and legal initiatives — to make it more equitable and open, giving us a glimpse into an instance of a small state’s agency in relation to the LIO.
Read the full article here.
