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Book Award |
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The CES Book Award Program honors talented emerging scholars with an award for the best first book on any subject in European studies. A multidisciplinary jury appointed by the Council’s Executive Committee evaluates the submissions and presents the award to the author of the winning title at the International Conference of the Council for European Studies.
The deadline for submission was November 1st, 2007; an exception to this deadline is granted only to those books published after the deadline, but before the close of 2007. Award The award will be presented to the author of the winning title at the Sixteenth International Conference, March 6 – 8, 2008, at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. The winning author will be awarded $1,000 from the Council. The recipient of the award and finalists will be recognized in forthcoming publications of CES. 2006 Recipients Chip Gagnon for The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. In the last ten years, Serbia and Croatia have become reference points for virtually all scholars who wish to analyze ethnic conflict either in Eastern Europe or in other parts of the world. Chip Gagnon who had visited the former Yugoslavia in the early 1980s found the outbreak of ethnic hatred and violence in this area in the 1990s puzzling. He saw the area as one rich in civil society with the potential for democratic cooperation once the Communist regime had fallen. Based on extensive field work and documentary evidence collected in the 1990s, Gagnon's Myth of Ethnic War makes the counter-intuitive claim that ethnic hatred and violence was not based upon the mobilization of primordial blood rivalries, but rather on the demobilization of collectivities that were poised to modernize the country given the historical opportunity. Political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb created and manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines to short circuit political and economic change in the early 1990s. Carefully argued, meticulously researched, Gagnon not only adds to previous historical accounts of conflict in the region, but also extends political cultural approaches to the study of politics by showing the demobilization is as important a component of constructivist accounts as mobilization. Francine Hirsch for Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Francine Hirsch’s Empire of Nations examines how the Bolsheviks carved a Soviet Union out of a disparate group of national territorial entities. Applying an approach more recently used in studies of democratic nation state building, Hirsh shows how the Bolsheviks went about integrating a national idea into an administrative territorial structure of the new Soviet State. By focusing upon this forced fusion of nation and state that occurred in the Bolshevik period she also manages to account for the fragility of the national idea when the Soviet Union broke apart in the 1990s. Unique to her account is her focus upon the role of former imperial ethnographers—local historians, who created accounts of the diverse “peoples of the USSR” as bed rock of the new Soviet Empire—an empire without imperialism. Hirsch marshals an impressive array of evidence that she skillfully deploys to construct an argument that is elegant in its nuance and forceful in its central claims. The overall effect of Empire of Nation is stunning and the analysis not only extends our knowledge of the former Soviet Union but also offers important insights to present political realities and the study of empire more generally. |
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