We are delighted to award the BIAPT Mid-Career Prize to Dr Paul Sagar, who is Reader in Political Theory at Kings College London. Sagar has made a seismic contribution to our field over the last decade and a half, bringing a unique scholarly energy to bear on debates in the history of moral philosophy, political ethics, realism, and contemporary normative theory.

Sagar devoted his early work to the Scottish Enlightenment, deftly revising our understanding of key figures such as Hume, Smith, and the (much neglected) Archibald Campbell. His first book, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton UP, 2018) pulled the intellectual history of the state out from under the shadow of Hobbes by recovering Hume’s effort to replace sovereignty with opinion as the arch-concept of modern politics. This was swiftly followed by Adam Smith Reconsidered: Liberty, History, and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Princeton UP, 2022), a bold reassessment of Smith’s political thought that has already achieved classical status in Smith scholarship. More recently, Sagar has turned his sights to another core political value, equality. In his latest monograph, Basic Equality (Princeton UP, 2026), Sagar offers an innovative defence of the fundamental equality between human beings, but does by going beyond philosophy, with  historical anthropology and psychology looming especially large in his analysis. In doing so, he takes up the gauntlet thrown by political realists, who have long held that philosophical treatments of our core political concepts must be infused with an empirical and historical sensitivity. It is a book of tremendous intellectual ambition and reach, and will doubtless be read by scholars in disciplines beyond our own.

Sagar’s contributions to pedagogy and to the wider political theory community have been no less impressive. On the teaching front, Sagar’s seminars at KCL have become well known for their rigour and popularity with students, many of whom have gone on to become historians of political thought themselves. He is an energetic reviewer, and has organised numerous symposia and panels for colleagues in the field, in addition to serving as an Associate Editor of Political Studies. In recent years Sagar has emerged as a prominent voice in public debates on everything from the crisis of British universities to the danger to democracy posed by the rise of a post-literate society. The sheer number and quality of his contributions to popular outlets such as The Guardian and UnHerd, not to mention numerous appearances on impactful podcasts such as Past, Present, Future, has been remarkable. Few political theorists have done as much to improve the visibility of our field in the wider political conversation.

Upon receiving the prize, Dr Sagar said: “I am honoured to receive this prize. If somebody had told me three years ago that I would be collecting an award for my contributions to scholarship and teaching, I would simply not have believed them. I am extraordinarily grateful to the colleagues and friends (political theorists or otherwise) who helped me get to this point. I could not have done it alone.”

Dr Shuk Ying Chan is a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at University College London. She was awarded a PhD in Politics by the University of Princeton in 2021 and since then has made an outstanding contribution to research and teaching in political thought and to the life of our intellectual community.

Chan’s research spans an impressive range of specialisms, including international political theory; anticolonial political thought; colonialism and decolonization; democracy and equality; empire and race; self-determination; political action; and political resistance. Chan draws on these specialisms to draw multiple strands of scholarship into conversation, such as Black anti-colonialism, post-colonialism, and indigenous studies. This makes her refreshingly original – avoiding both the aridity that can characterize contemporary analytic political philosophy, and the aloofness sometimes found in the history of political thought. The ecumenical spirit undergirding Chan’s research is increasingly necessary in our fractured world.

Chan’s first monograph, Postcolonial Global Justice – published by Princeton University Press – is an excellent example of how she has creatively and productively deployed this methodology to answer pressing questions both in theory and practice. In the book, she draws on and reconstructs the normative visions and political programmes of thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Jawaharlal Nehru and Kwame Nkrumah, systematically connecting them to contemporary debates about global justice. She advances several historically-informed action-guiding principles that help us to assess questions of self-determination and equality in the context of global governance, international investment, and global cultural exchange. This project is based on her doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the prestigious 2022 Leo Strauss Award for best dissertation in political philosophy by the American Political Science Association. Chan is also a highly productive researcher, with a string of publishing successes in some of the very best journals in political philosophy and theory, including American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, and Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Importantly, Chan does not reserve her energies for her own advancement. Instead, she has devoted a significant amount of time and attention to the academic community. She serves on the Steering Committee of the International Political Theory Standing Group at the European Consortium for Political Research, which seeks to foster and facilitate the exchange of ideas across its members in various countries. She is also a co-founder and convenor of the London Political Theory Network, which brings together London’s political theory community for regular events. We understand that Chan is an excellent and dedicated teacher on courses such as ‘Historical Injustice and the Politics of Decolonization’, and a wonderful and inspiring colleague to work with. We are delighted to award this prize to Chan in recognition of these many contributions to our profession.

Upon receiving the prize, Dr Chan said: “I am truly honoured and grateful to receive the BIAPT Early Career Prize. I would like to thank all my mentors, friends and colleagues for their support, which helped get to this point in my career, and I am committed to paying it forward.”

We are delighted to announce that our next annual conference will take place in Exeter from January 6th-8th, 2027!

Academic Convenors: Alex McLaughlin (Exeter), Jemima Repo (Newcastle), Camila Vergara (Essex)

Local Organisers: Sarah Drews Lucas, Kate Goldie Townsend, Andrew Schaap, Bingshu Zhao

The BIAPT conference is the flagship event of the scholarly community of political theorists across Britain and Ireland. Taking place annually since the 1970s, it brings together theorists working across the whole field of political thought.

This year’s plenary speakers are Davina Cooper (King’s College London), Stephen Gardiner (University of Washington), Rauna Kuokkanen  (University of Lapland), Richard Whatmore (St Andrews University), Musab Younis (University of Oxford)

We now invite proposals in the following formats:

(1) Panel proposals of three papers per panel (please include panel title, author information, plus individual paper abstracts);

(2) Individual paper proposals (please include paper title, author info, and abstract; accepted proposals will be organised into panels by the convenors);

(3) ‘Author meets critics’ roundtables (please include book title, publisher and year, and description, including provisional list of critics and their affiliations). Please note that it is expected that only up to 2 proposals will be accepted in this format.

(4) First book manuscript workshop, where monograph manuscripts of an author’s first book will be presented and discussed with selected respondents (please submit a description of your manuscript and a list of up to 4 provisional respondents. At least one respondent should be confirmed). Please note that it is expected that only up to 2 proposals will be accepted in this format.

     We look forward to a conference that represents a diverse set of intellectual traditions, including analytic and normative political philosophy, the history of ideas, all traditions of critical theory, as well as comparative and global political theory. Panels that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries and submissions from graduate students are welcome.

BIAPT has some funds available to defray conference fees for scholars from the Global South and for graduate students. Those wishing to be considered for such support should note this on the proposal submission form.

Please submit proposals here.

The final deadline for submission is Friday 24^th July 2026 and notifications will be issued in September 2026.

 For any questions, you can write to us at conference@associationforpoliticalthought.ac.uk

Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought Prizes

Nominations are invited for two prizes:

1. The BIAPT Early-Career Prize 2026
   Open to political theorists within eight years of award of their PhD or equivalent on 1^st January 2026.
2. The BIAPT Mid-Career Prize 2026
   Open to political theorists who are more than eight years from award of their PhD or equivalent on 1^st January 2026 but who are not full Professors.

• Each prize will be awarded to the nominated candidate who, in the judgment of the Executive Committee, has made the greatest overall contribution to research and teaching in political thought, as well as to the life of our intellectual community and service to the profession, understood broadly and in line with BIAPT’s mission at https://www.associationforpoliticalthought.ac.uk/about-us/
• Candidates must be academic political theorists or political philosophers employed at universities or HE institutions in Britain or Ireland; casual, fixed-term, and zero-hours employment included.
• Time limits for eligibility will be adjusted where necessary to make allowances for time out of academia (non-academic careers, caring leave, illness, etc.). Nominations should make clear if this adjustment is being sought and time away should be indicated on the CV.

Procedures for nominations

• Entry for each of the prizes will be via nomination. Entrants may nominate themselves.
• The nominator must supply 1) a supporting statement of no more than one page, setting out the entrant’s contribution to political thought research, teaching, and service; as well as 2) the entrant’s CV.
• The BIAPT Executive Committee will be responsible for choosing the prize winners.
• Current Executive Committee members, and persons who have served on the Executive Committee in the last three years, are not eligible to make nominations, to be nominated for, or to win either prize.
• Each prize, which will consist of a certificate and a £100 book token, will be awarded at the Political Thought Conference to be held in Exeter in January 2027. Prize winners will also be announced on the Association’s website, Facebook page, and other social and mainstream media. Acceptance of either prize will be taken as consent to publicity of this sort.
• Nominations should be sent to Maxime Lepoutre, Secretary of BIAPT, at m.c.lepoutre@reading.ac.uk with “BIAPT prizes” as the subject header.
• The deadline for nominations is 22^nd May 2026.

We are pleased to award the BIAPT Mid-Career Prize to Dr Jemima Repo, who is a Reader in Political and Feminist Theory at Newcastle University and an outstanding citizen of the international community of researchers in political theory. Driven by a commitment to making political theory speak critically yet productively to some of the most pressing debates and issues of contemporary politics, Repo has made numerous original theoretical contributions to gender theory, biopolitics and feminism.

Her book The Biopolitics of Gender (OUP, 2015) disrupted conventional perceptions of ‘gender’ as inherently liberatory, offering an insightful retelling of its history, challenging widespread assumptions about its transformative potential. Theorising gender as an historically specific biopolitical apparatus, she drew on extensive archival research to trace the emergence of ‘gender’ in 1950s psychiatry, its feminist appropriations in the 1970s, all the way to its institutionalisation in 1990s social policy. The book was awarded the prestigious 2017 International Studies Association’s Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Book Award and has become a key theoretical text in multiple disciplines.

Her current research focuses on two projects. On the one hand, Repo works at the intersection of social reproduction theory, biopolitics and settler colonial studies, offering a new framework for understanding how struggles over labour and land are fundamentally entwined through life-making processes under settler colonial rule – with a focus on Palestine. On the other, she is interrogating the gendered logics of ‘Chicago School’ economics and economic arguments for gender equality. The findings of this latter project were published in the journal International Political Sociology, and awarded the 2021 American Political Science Association Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory, in recognition of Repo’s conceptual innovation:  Repo proposed ‘feminist commodity activism’ to theorise the entanglement of feminist protest and consumer capitalism.

Pedagogically, Repo has demonstrated a commitment to enhancing students’ interest in political theory and nurturing their intellectual capacities. Her courses have attracted massive student interest, and have been consistently oversubscribed. She also has vast experience in supervising graduate students, whose projects tackle important political challenges with the tools of feminist, gender and decolonial theory.

As a member of the profession, Repo’s contributions have been exemplary. Her editorial work for one of the key international journals in political theory (Contemporary Political Theory), as well as her involvement with international professional organisations (both as a conference convener and section chair for large entities) and prominent prize juries, are truly exceptional for a mid-career scholar. In all these capacities, she has shown excellent leadership and dedication, epitomising the virtues of a good academic citizen. Her academic outreach activities – dealing with issues such as women’s rights, reproduction, political violence, the rise of the Far Right – complete the profile or a highly original and publicly engaged thinker.

Upon receipt of this award, Dr Repo said: “It means a great deal to receive this award from BIAPT. I am grateful to the judges, and to the many colleagues whose generosity, encouragement, and collaboration have made my career not only possible, but also worthwhile.”

We are very happy to announce that Dr Joe Davidson has been awarded the BIAPT Early-Career Prize for 2025. Following completion of his PhD at King’s College (2022), Cambridge, Davidson won a highly competitive Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Warwick (2022-2025) and has recently begun a prestigious Vice-Chancellor’s Independent Research Fellowship at Loughborough University.

Davidson’s research and teaching focuses principally on the social theory of the future, analysing both utopian accounts of better worlds and apocalyptic visions of the end of everything. His diverse body of written work has both contemporary and historical focal points, ranging from political responses to the contemporary climate crisis to mid-twentieth century anticolonial analyses of economic relations.

In his forthcoming monograph, Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026), Davidson addresses the remarkable absence of utopia from the contemporary cultural landscape. Through analysis of the nature of and challenges faced by the literary tradition itself, he makes the case for the importance of utopian narratives, especially in times of profound political pessimism. He unpacks the political power of the valuable but rare contemporary utopian stories in Black, feminist, and green thought amid contexts of violence, oppression, and democratic imperilment. Saving Utopia will make an original and urgent contribution to contemporary political theory.

In addition to his path-breaking monograph, Davidson has also published numerous significant articles in world-leading journals, including American Political Science Review, Political Studies, Environmental Politics, and Feminist Theory. The subjects and texts that he covers in these articles are many and various, making unique and powerful contributions to different scholarly conversations across politics, sociology and related disciplines.

As well as developing such a large and impressively dextrous research portfolio of publications that are already shaping scholarly discussions, Dr Davidson has demonstrated a commitment to innovative teaching, leading modules that immerse both undergraduate and postgraduate students in myriad literatures that expand the canon of political thought. His ‘Decolonising Ecology’ module – taught at Warwick – provides an exemplary exposure of students to anti-colonial and indigenous texts through a specific focus on contemporary environmentalism.

Upon receipt of the award, Dr Davidson said ‘I am delighted to be awarded the BIAPT Early-Career Prize. It is an honour to have been recognised by the judges, and I am grateful to them for considering my work. A huge thank you to my mentors, colleagues and coauthors who have supported my research over the years’.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought Conference

7–9 January 2026 – University of Edinburgh

Academic Convenors: Alfred Moore (York), Tom O’Shea (Edinburgh) and Signy Gutnick Allen (Zurich)

Local Organisers: Mihaela Mihai, Jared Holley, Mathias Thaler (Edinburgh)

A key theme for our 2026 conference in Edinburgh will be the politics of climate and the environment, and we particularly encourage proposals in this area, as well as those from all sub-fields within political thought. This year’s plenary speakers are Alyssa Battistoni (Barnard), Ross Carroll (Dublin City), Angie Pepper (Roehampton), Rahul Rao (St. Andrews) and Johanna Thoma (Bayreuth).

You can submit a proposal that has any of the following formats:

(1) Panel proposals of three papers per panel (please include panel title, authors, plus paper abstracts);

(2) Individual paper proposals (please include paper title, author, and abstract; accepted proposals will be organised into panel sessions by the academic convenors);

(3) ‘Author meets critics’ roundtables (please include book title, publisher and year, and description, including provisional list of critics and their affiliations). Please note that it is expected that only up to 2 proposals will be accepted in this format.

(4) First book manuscript workshop, where monograph manuscripts of an author’s first book will be presented and discussed with selected respondents (please submit a description of your manuscript and a list of up to 4 provisional respondents, with at least one already confirmed). Please note that it is expected that only up to 2 proposals will be accepted in this format.

Please submit your proposals HERE.

We look forward to a conference that represents a diverse set of intellectual traditions, including analytic and normative political philosophy, the history of ideas, all traditions of critical theory, as well as comparative and global political theory. Panels that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries and submissions from graduate students are most welcome.

BIAPT has some limited funds available to defray conference fees for scholars from the Global South and for graduate students: to be considered for such support, please signal your relevant eligibility on the proposal submission form.

The final deadline for submission is Tuesday 22nd July, 2025 (6pm BST).  The academic convenors will communicate decisions by early September 2025. For any questions, you can write to us at conference@associationforpoliticalthought.ac.uk

Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought Prizes 2025

Nominations are invited for our two annual prizes:

1. The BIAPT Early-Career Prize 2025
   Open to political theorists within eight years of award of their PhD or equivalent on 1^st January 2025.
2. The BIAPT Mid-Career Prize 2025
   Open to political theorists who are more than eight years from award of their PhD or equivalent on 1^st January 2025 but who are not full Professors.

• Each prize will be awarded to the nominated candidate who, in the judgment of the Executive Committee, has made the greatest overall contribution to research and teaching in political thought, as well as to the life of our intellectual community and service to the profession, understood broadly and in line with BIAPT’s mission at https://www.associationforpoliticalthought.ac.uk/about-us/
• Candidates must be academic political theorists or political philosophers employed at universities or HE institutions in Britain or Ireland; casual, fixed-term, and zero-hours employment included.
• Time limits for eligibility will be adjusted where necessary to make allowances for time out of academia (non-academic careers, caring leave, illness, etc.). Nominations should make clear if this adjustment is being sought and time away should be indicated on the CV.

Procedures for nominations

• Entry for each of the prizes will be via nomination. Entrants may nominate themselves.
• The nominator must supply 1) a supporting statement of no more than one page, setting out the entrant’s contribution to political thought research, teaching, and service; as well as 2) the entrant’s CV.
• The BIAPT Executive Committee will be responsible for choosing the prize winners.
• Current Executive Committee members, and persons who have served on the Executive Committee in the last three years, are not eligible to make nominations, to be nominated for, or to win either prize.
• Each prize, which will consist of a certificate and a £100 book token, will be awarded at the Political Thought Conference to be held in Edinburgh in January 2026. Prize winners will also be announced on the Association’s website, Facebook page, and other media. Acceptance of either prize will be taken as consent to publicity of this sort.
• Nominations should be sent to Maxime Lepoutre, Secretary of BIAPT, at m.c.lepoutre@reading.ac.uk with “BIAPT prizes” as the subject header.
• The deadline for nominations is 6th June 2025.

2024 BIAPT Mid-Career Prize Winner: Dr Onur Ulas Ince

The BIAPT Executive Committee is pleased to award its 2024 Mid-Career Prize to Dr Onur Ulas Ince of SOAS, University of London, in recognition of his ground-breaking contributions to the field. Dr Ince’s research has taken political theory’s imperial turn in new and refreshing directions by incorporating insights from the history of capitalism, imperial intellectual history, and global political economy. His award-winning monograph Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2018) grapples with the conflicted origins of liberalism, emphasising how its commitments to the freedoms of property, labour, and trade were inextricably bound up with colonial processes of territorial conquest, resource extraction, racialised domination, and systematic enslavement. By bringing the political economy of colonialism to the fore, Ince has successfully challenged the emphasis on universalism and cultural difference that has hitherto framed treatments of liberalism’s imperial origins. The book also offers novel interpretations of key figures in the history of political thought, including John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon.

More recently, Ince has embarked on two new ambitious projects that further reveal the rich potential of his approach to the history of imperial thought. The first, Beyond the Colour Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia, 1800-1850, builds on his earlier research by looking at how racial categories and hierarchies were forged in the process of British imperialism in Asia, and in the encounter of British imperialists with their Chinese counterparts. Beyond the Colour Line not only obliges us to rethink how racialised capitalism emerged; it also exposes the ‘Atlanticist’ methodological biases of the scholarship on empire by foregrounding Asia as an undertheorized arena of British imperial expansion and contestation. The project has already produced two articles in the American Political Science Review, with a monograph with Oxford University Press to follow. In the second new project, Ince explores of what he calls the “limits of liberal anti-imperialism” in the work of Scottish Enlightenment figures such as Adam Smith and David Hume.

Dr Ince’s career trajectory has mirrored the global reach of his scholarship. Since graduating with a PhD from Cornell University in 2013, he has taught in Turkey (at Koç University), Singapore (at Singapore Management University), and now in the imperial metropole itself, London (at SOAS). In each of these locales Ince has made his mark beyond research through inspiring teaching (in Singapore he was nominated for the Most Promising Teacher Award) and through service to the profession. Examples of the latter include his co-chairing of the Association for Political Theory’s 2018 conference in America, and copious reviewing for a host of journals. Dr Ince is therefore a thoroughly deserving winner of this year’s Mid-career prize.

In response to his award, Dr Ince said “Academics have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. And some of them have also been lucky enough to get a prize for it, a position I am now delighted to find myself in. The judges have my thanks for their consideration.”