Professor Louise Amoore awarded BISA 2024 prize for Best Article in the Review of International Studies (RIS)

British International Studies Association (BISA) awards Louise Amoore the 2024 prize for Best Article in the Review of International Studies (RIS). 

This Prize is awarded annually by the editorial advisory board of BISA's journal Review of International Studies (RIS). It is awarded for the best article published in the previous year's volume of the journal. This year the board chose Louise Amoore’s Machine Learning Political Orders (RIS 2023, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 20-36).

The judges noted:

“This innovative article argues that machine learning is doing much more than re-shaping how politics is conducted: it is working to re-order the political, with various problems re-imagined not as political problems, but as a machine learning problem for an algorithm to resolve. In the process, the author maintains that machine learning is not just disrupting existing ways of doing politics, but establishing new expectations about how politics ought to be done (well), and who is authorised to do politics. As the author explains, ‘it is itself a mode of politics that arranges the orderings of public space, adjudicates what a claimable right could be, discriminates the bodies of those on whom it is enacted’. The theoretical claims of this discipline-shaping paper are outlined in considerable detail, but what is remarkable is how the author illustrates these claims through various examples, such as the Cambridge Analytica case. In doing so, “Machine Learning Political Orders” makes a significant contribution to specialised debates about algorithmic thinking in IR, but also a much broader contribution to debates about the political, which will resonate with people working within IR, and across the various disciplinary divides.

The judges also gave an honourable mention to Rafi Youatt for Interspecies politics and the global rat: Ecology, extermination, experiment, RIS 49(2). They noted:

“This innovative piece, with relevance for several different IR literatures, deals with an uncommon topic - rats - to develop a theoretical discussion on the recent IR debate on interspecies internationality. Complex, well written and engaging, this article contributes to broader IR literature by placing post-colonialism and socioecological interfaces under new light. More specifically, it contributes to the IR discussion on environmental issues by situating the framework of interspecies internationality within the field’s three main recent theoretical developments on the relationship between humans and nonhumans: the Anthropocene approach, geopolitics and planetary frameworks. The author also discusses - in a way that is both uncomfortable and didactic - how the rat can be seen as a metaphor for “violence, exclusion, and the conditions of shared life”.