Maria Mälksoo receives prize for best article
The journal ‘Review of International Studies’ and British International Studies Association have awarded Maria Mälksoo, senior researcher at the Centre for Military Studies, its 2022 prize for the best article. It focuses on the so-called ‘memory laws’ in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine.
How do states and governments form the narratives of their historical past using memory laws, and for what political purposes?
These are some of the questions Senior Researcher Maria Mälksoo analyses in her ‘Militant memocracy in International Relations: Mnemonical status anxiety and memory laws in Eastern Europe’, which has now been awarded British International Studies Association’s Best Article in the Review of International Studies Prize. The journal is published by Cambridge University Press.
The jury finds that Mälksoo has written an excellent and timely article, which provides a novel theorisation of the nexus between memory, history and international status-seeking through the concept of ‘militant memocracy’, that is the governance of historical memory by prescribing and proscribing memory laws.
In the article, she advances the argument in the empirical context of the memory laws adopted in the last decade in Russia, Poland and Ukraine against the backdrop of their ongoing memory wars. One example is the Polish law prohibiting defamation of the Polish state and nation by claiming its co-responsibility for Nazi crimes committed in Poland during WWII.
“The article unpacks these processes through an empirically rich and nuanced account of memory politics in three states in the Central and Eastern Europe: Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, demonstrating the global political stakes of states’ efforts to govern how national histories can – and cannot – be told,” as the jury concludes.
The article’s themes are further explored in the framework of the Volkswagen Foundation-supported collaborative research project MEMOCRACY, wherein Dr Mälksoo leads the team of the UCPH.
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Read the full article in Review of International Studies Prize, vol. 47, nr. 4 (open access: Militant memocracy in International Relations: Mnemonical status anxiety and memory laws in Eastern Europe. Or a summary.
The prize was shared with Thomas Kwasi Tieku (King's University College, Western University, Canada), som modtog sin del af prisen for artiklen 'The Legon School of International Relations'.