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Awarded for the best doctoral dissertation completed and accepted during the past two calendar years in the field of international relations, law, and politics.

Award Committee: Robert H. Cox, Chair, University of Oklahoma; Neta C. Crawford, Boston University; and J. Ann Tickner, University of Southern California

Recipient: Daniel Levine, Colgate University

Dissertation: "Critical Wrestlings: The Problem of Sustainable Critique in International Theory"

Citation: In a thought-provoking and wide-ranging analysis of a multiplicity of international relations and political theory literatures, Daniel Levine challenges International Relations scholars to rethink the artificial division between “normative” and “value-free” international theory. Challenging the assertion that theory can ever be ethically neutral, Levine claims that normative commitments are almost always present in international theory. To support this claim, he takes us on a far-reaching historical journey through the writings of a broad array of leading theorists, showing that many of them make explicit their normative commitments. However, he proceeds to demonstrate that these normative commitments are rarely sustained throughout the process of theory-building which, in most cases, falls prey to the pitfalls of reification that do not serve to help us better understand our diverse and dangerous world. To construct an International Relations that is dynamic and that can take account of the multiple histories and lived experiences of all peoples in this diverse world, Levine calls upon the discipline to open itself up to critical self-reflection. Drawing on the scholarship of the early Frankfurt School, in particular Theodor Adorno’s idea of Negative Dialectics, Levine lays out a methodological framework that he calls “sustainable critique” which, in his words, would hold the theorist of world politics to a high standard of ethical reflexivity. 

Besides commending Daniel Levine for such a careful, comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of a vast array of literatures, (the bibliography alone is thirty pages long), the Committee would especially like to congratulate Levine for his courage in challenging all of us, whatever our normative and scientific commitments, to ask ourselves to be critically reflective of our own scholarship and to reexamine our own ethical commitments.