Shortlist: International Affairs Early Career Prize 2023
The International Affairs team announces the four articles shortlisted for our annual prize
In 2017, the editorial team at International Affairs launched the Early Career Prize, designed to celebrate the research published in the journal by authors with less than seven years of experience in the field of International Relations post-PhD. After a rigorous selection process, we can now reveal the four articles which made our shortlist for the 2023 prize.
Why?
It has rarely been harder to launch a career in academia. Current demands placed on PhD students and post-doctoral researchers in terms of teaching, course administration, outreach, and, of course, research, have been well documented.
In light of this 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 such a rewarding exercise.
When will the winner be announced?
The winner will be announced during ISA’s 2023 Annual Convention in March. If you are attending ISA this year either in person or online then we would be delighted to see you there. Follow us on Twitter to find out the details.
The shortlist
The following articles have been shortlisted by members of our editorial board. They are listed in order of the issue in which they were published.
1) Saffronizing diplomacy: the Indian Foreign Service under Hindu nationalist rule
Kira Huju
Abstract: Very little is known about how Indian diplomats have made sense of the change in political power in New Delhi since 2014, when the election of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi signalled a radical break from the internationalist credo of the Nehruvian Congress establishment. Attending to this gap in knowledge, this article engages with the ongoing debate about the influence of Hindu nationalism on Indian diplomacy, but departs from the conventional emphasis on foreign-policy analysis or Modi’s persona. Instead, it centres on the lived experience of career diplomats in the Indian Foreign Service to whom it falls to conduct everyday diplomacy under Hindu nationalist rule. This focus invites a broader question in the global age of populism: how do contemporary diplomatic services adjust to the arrival of nationalist governments? I suggest that the delays in internalization of nationalist norms and diplomatic practices are only partly a function of ideological misalignment between an internationalist bureaucracy and a nationalist government. What matters is also the extent to which the status of the social class represented by the bureaucrats is invalidated by the government’s political project. Building its arguments on the back of 85 elite interviews and archival research in India, the article considers changes to diplomatic discourse, protocol, priorities and training, and details how Indian diplomats have adjusted to and resisted Hindu nationalism. It suggests that we study nationalist critiques of ‘cosmopolitan elites’ both as an ideological denunciation of internationalist commitments and as a social rejection of the elites who hold them.
2) Diasporas as cyberwarriors: infopolitics, participatory warfare and the 2020 Karabakh war
Dmitry Chernobrov
Abstract: How do diasporas fight online information wars during armed conflicts in their homelands? I explore this question through interviews with 30 young diaspora Armenians in seven nations about their practical experiences of online activism during the 2020 Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. I examine their motivations for engaging in social media activism; strategies and methods of promoting the Armenian narrative; vision of the online opponent; and perceived outcomes of their efforts. Besides investigating this recent case of diaspora mobilization during armed conflict, the study offers broader conclusions about social media and participatory warfare, and about the changing roles of diasporas in international relations. I demonstrate how social media enable participatory war that is transnational, monologic, empowering and retaliatory, involving individual and networked tactics, and culturally and politically transformative. Diasporas, traditionally seen as international agents of lobbying, public diplomacy and material assistance, become important decentralized actors in global conflict infopolitics.
3) Atomic aesthetics: gender, visualization and popular culture in Egypt
Hebatalla Taha
Abstract: How was the atomic age visualized in Egypt in the years immediately after the creation of the bomb? What role did gendered images, symbols and metaphors play in narrating and normalizing nuclear technology? How can these help us understand nuclear policy today? This article engages visual and textual media, including satirical magazines, cultural journals and film. It presents a plurality of images: the depiction of the bomb as an egg, as a miniscule and aesthetically pleasing object, alongside more alarming illustrations of the bomb as a monster. Through fluid and unstable visualizations, nationalist modernizers highlighted the ambivalence of nuclear technology, seen as containing potential for postcolonial rebirth and global death simultaneously. By exploring nuclear imaginaries from the decolonizing world, the article challenges the dominant narratives, histories and aesthetics of the atomic age. Despite the continuous reiteration of nuclear weapons as masculine in feminist International Relations, this conceptualization is not necessarily universal, and this research illustrates that feminizing nuclear imagery can still reinforce the nuclearized world. Considering visualization from, and not only of, the global South, the article emphasizes that people in non-nuclear weapons-possessing states also participated in the production of the nuclear-armed world and in discussions on the nuclear condition.
4) Hybrid balancing as classical realist statecraft: China’s balancing behaviour in the Indo-Pacific
Ryuta Ito
Abstract: Hybrid warfare has recently attracted scholarly attention. Despite its importance, hybrid warfare research remains underdeveloped, as it sometimes falls into the trap of ‘simplistic hypothesis testing’, which focuses on narrowly defined military factors while downplaying the fundamentals of international politics (e.g. balancing and diplomacy). This article fills this gap by constructing a new theoretical concept called ‘hybrid balancing’ by introducing the essence of hybrid warfare into classical realism, based on the scientific realism in the philosophy of science as a meta-theoretical foundation. ‘Hybrid balancing’ consists of three ideal types of balancing beyond the traditional hard one: political, economic and informational balancing. As a plausibility probe to show that the argument is sufficiently grounded in evidence to justify further research, I illustrate the new concept by examining China’s hybrid warfare in the Indo-Pacific, an arena of geopolitical competition between China and the United States. The implications of the research are that it (1) shows the significance of ‘agency’ over ‘structure’ to solve the agent–structure debate, (2) develops a new theoretical concept explaining non-military aspects of balancing, (3) overcomes ‘simplistic hypothesis testing’, and (4) sheds new light on the Indo-Pacific, which had been overlooked in previous research around hybrid warfare.
