2026 IPS Award Winners Announcement
IPS Section
Dear IPS Members,
The IPS Section is proud to announce our 2026 Award winners! Every year, our section presents three awards: the Best Graduate Paper, the Best Book, and the Distinguished Scholar. After carefully reviewing the many great submissions we received, we are happy to present the award winners. Thank you to all who submitted their work! The 2026 IPS awardees will be celebrated at the joint IPS/STAIR reception at ISA Columbus on Monday, March 23rd, 2026.
IPS Best Graduate Paper Award
The winner of the 2026 IPS Best Graduate Paper Award is 'Epistemic Exclusion in Climate Science: Why We Grow the Wrong Trees in the Wrong Places', by Jittip Mongkolnchaiarunya. The paper examines tree-planting practices as a way of analyzing the exclusion of global south scientific perspectives from climate science. In the process, it also critiques the data and assumptions built into prevailing models driving climate change policy. The committee found this paper to be empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated. The committee encourages the author to further develop the line of research around the politics of knowledge production and sees a clear contribution to contemporary debates around situated vs. universalistic epistemologies.
There was a particularly strong field of nominations for this year’s award, and the committee would like to give an honourable mention to the paper titled ‘The logics of the field. From Security Risk Management to Care’, by Dalia Saris.
IPS Book Award
The winner of the 2026 IPS Book Award is The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo, by Jacinto Cuvi. The book’s main theoretical approach is one that recasts citizenship in between the blurred lines of legality and illegality, formality and informality. The key strength of the book is its rich empirical analysis, in which Cuvi highlights the precarity experienced by the street vendors of São Paulo but also the tactics they use to negotiate their daily work.
PS Distinguished Scholar Award
The winner of the 2026 IPS Distinguished Scholar award is Professor Vicki Squire, of Warwick University. Professor Squire’s work has made a major contribution to how our field conceives of mobility, asylum, humanitarianism, and the contested politics of borders. This contribution extends beyond her own research, and Professor Squire has served the IPS community as a supervisor, mentor, and more formally as a co-editor of International Political Sociology. Congratulations Vicki! The traditional Distinguished Scholar panel will be held online in the weeks leading up to the ISA Annual Convention. Further details will be announced in the new year.
Congratulations to the 2026 IPS Awardees! We hope to see you in Columbus, Ohio, to celebrate with us!
All the best,
2025-2026 IPS Governance
