BISA African Affairs Postgraduate Paper Prize
The British International Studies Association (BISA) African Affairs Postgraduate Paper Prize is awarded for the best paper on a topic related to Africa, presented at either the BISA Postgraduate Network Conference or the BISA Annual Conference, by a postgraduate student (i.e. prior to graduation with a PhD). The winning paper will be chosen by the panel according to criteria of originality, significance and rigour, and the panel are happy to consider papers which are empirical and/or theoretical. The panel is nominated by the convenors of the BISA Africa and International Studies working group and the editors of African Affairs . Papers should convey a strong sense of contemporary African political realities, as well as make a contribution to the study of international affairs in Africa or from an African perspective. The award is £150 and winning authors will be encouraged to submit their paper to African Affairs .
International Relations Virtual Issue
To celebrate the launch of the prize, the journal collected some of the most insightful and influential articles that it has published on Africa's International Relations and collated them in the Africa's International Relations Virtual Issue.
2021 Prize Winner
After years of not being able to make this award, largely due to Covid-19, the working group panel (Dele Kogbe, Peter Brett and Tarela Ike) are delighted to announce that Tycho van der Hoog is the winner of the British International Studies Association (BISA) African Affairs Postgraduate Paper Prize for 2021. He has been awarded for 'the Military Alliance Between North Korea and Southern Africa', an exciting paper that uses original research to revisit the history of the Cold War from both Africa and North Korean perspectives. The panel are very grateful to all of those who submitted papers, and greatly enjoyed listening to all the postgraduate presentations at this year's BISA conferences. Congratulations Tycho on this well deserved award!
Previous Prize Winners
2018: The 2018 winner of the BISA African Affairs Postgraduate Paper Prize is Tarela Ike (University of East London) with her paper: 'Demystifying the religiosity in religious terrorism: a case study of Boko Haram in Nigeria'. The paper makes an important contribution to our understanding of perceptions of terrorism in specific cases. Though much has been written on perceptions of Islamic terrorism, this has tended to focus on Western contexts. We were, therefore, pleased to see the topic being tackled in an African context. The panel were particularly impressed with the detailed and rich interview data, from different regions in Nigeria, which Tarela's paper incorporated.
2017: The African Affairs Prize this year has been awarded to Ueli Staeger, based at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, for his paper presented at the 2017 BISA Annual Conference in Brighton. The piece is titled 'External actor involvement at the African Union: organization, resources and practices.'
The competition was very strong this year, but the judges felt that Ueli's paper stood out from the crowd. It develops a strong case for focusing on the interactions between external and internal actors when studying African regionalism, and emphasises the ways in which regionalism is brought into being by interaction and social practice rather than simply rules, structures and norms. His case study provides an interesting and novel insight into China's engagement with infrastructure development in Africa. Ueli is undertaking further fieldwork this year to develop his arguments and will work with African Affairs to prepare the paper for submission in due course.
2016: We are delighted to announce that this year's BISA African Affairs Postgraduate Paper Prize has been jointly awarded to Luke Abbs (University of Kent) and Nicole de Silva (University of Oxford). The entries this year were of extremely high quality, and it was a difficult decision for the judges, but in the end these two papers stood out as equally deserving of the prize. Nicole's paper, "Africa Versus the International Criminal Court: The Strategy of Regionalizing International Criminal Justice", discusses how African states' attitudes to the ICC changed over time, from trying to work with and change the ICC from within to pursuing proposals to create alternative regional institutions. Luke's paper, "The Hunger Games: Food Prices, Ethno-Political Exclusion and Nonviolent Unrest in Africa", examines how food price shocks can act as a unifying issue to mobilize disparate opposition groups into non-violent action. Both papers were judged by the panel to stand out in terms of originality of argument, rigour, and significance. Congratulations Luke and Nicole!
2015: The winner of the inaugural BISA African Affairs Postgraduate Paper Prize in 2015 was Kathy Dodworth (Edinburgh). Kathy's paper "Negotiating the public: Voluntarism and its work in Tanzania", has now been published in African Affairs. The panel (consisting of Suda Perera, Rita Abrahamsenand Will Brown) concluded that Dodworth's paper is notable for engaging with a contemporary debate in IR about public authority and legitimation, while simultaneously illustrating this through rich and detailed fieldwork. It is an intriguing and highly interesting paper, that engages both with recent theoretical debates about public authority and with extensive empirical fieldwork. Its main aim is to show how NGOs in Tanzania use various practices and discourses of voluntarism to construct public authority, thus illustrating the continuity between state and civil society, the public and the private. Overall, the paper succeeds in bringing out the ambiguities and complexities in these practices of legitimation, and the result is an interesting portrayal of the competition between NGOs and some of the effects on the local volunteers and communities.
