Our postdoctoral research fellow Lukas Schmid has been awarded the European Consortium for Political Research‘s (ECPR) 2024 Jean Blondel Prize for the best thesis in politics.
ECPR awards the prize yearly, instructing a jury of renowned political scientists to select the year’s best thesis in politics (broadly conceived to include International Relations, Political Theory and Public Administration) nominated by an ECPR member institution.
This year’s jury verdict reads: Lukas’s work represents a groundbreaking contribution to contemporary political theory. The dissertation is a significant achievement that challenges us to rethink the foundations of state authority in the context of immigration. It is a work that will leave a lasting mark on the field and beyond.
Parts of Three Essays on the Legitimate Authority of Immigration Control, the awarded thesis, can be read as individual, peer-reviewed articles. A first article is Saving Migrants’ Basic Human Rights from Sovereign Rule, published in American Political Science Review. A second article is Colonial Injustice, Legitimate Authority, and Immigration Control, published in European Journal of Political Theory. Lukas is currently re-developing the now prize-winning dissertation to serve as the basis for a more wide-ranging book manuscript on the same topic.