It’s time to vote for the winner of the CIPS Best Blog Award! The CIPS Best Blog Award is designed to recognize the best blog written by the CIPS community during the previous academic year. This is the fifth year that we will be giving out the award.
The 2024 award will go to a blog that was written between June 2023 and May 2024. During that period, we published 51 blogs on a wide variety of topics, including the radical right, CETA, Indonesia, elections in Taiwan, climate change, the Israel-Gaza conflict, and more. We hope that you have enjoyed and appreciated reading them as much as we have. Voting is now closed.
CIPS will donate $300 to an organisation of the winner’s choosing.
The full list of 51 blogs was narrowed down to a top four by our 3 judges, who kindly read through each of the blogs and evaluated them based on the following criteria:
- The importance of the policy issue discussed
- The originality of the academic insight it provides
- The quality of the argument and the quality of the writing
We’re thankful for the time and energy that the judges put into this task, and for the short list that they have provided. Read more about the judges below.
The shortlist is as follows:
Is Global Warming Accelerating? A Terrifying Scientific Debate with No Easy Policy Options
By Ryan Katz-Rosene
Unless you’ve been living underneath a rock, you will have heard that global average temperatures were shattered this summer. July and August were the hottest months ever recorded (since record-keeping began in 1850), and September 2023 was orders of magnitude warmer than any previous September (see Figure 1). In all likelihood Earth’s average temperature this year will be hotter than any other since the origins of human civilization. What explains the current extreme heat? Does it represent the beginning of an unexpected acceleration in warming? What are we to do from a climate governance point of view? The answers to these questions have just gotten a bit more nuanced. Over the last few years, a slight wedge has emerged between two climate science urgency narratives.
What the Alliance des États du Sahel Means for Security Politics in West Africa 
By Philippe M. Frowd
The Sahel region has been at the heart of African peace and security concerns for over a decade. While the ongoing conflict in Mali is an epicentre of insecurity in the region, no state has been untouched by jihadist insurgencies in that time. Western states have taken a key interest in counterterrorism in the region for almost twenty years. As deaths and displacement grow, most notably in the central Sahel — Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — the question of how to counter terrorism and insurgency remains at the top of the political agenda.
Exclusion and Democracy: A Look at Immigration Justice in Democratic States
By Patti Tamara Lenard
The news is filled with stories of migrants, many of whom are asylum seekers, struggling to gain access to safe states and of the poor treatment with which they are met when they finally do. In the United States, many governors near the border with Mexico have taken to rounding up migrants and forcibly sending them north. In the Mediterranean Sea, migrants drown in sinking ships waiting for states – and increasingly, humanitarian organizations – to send rescue missions. Migrants fleeing persecution in Sri Lanka landed at a small British Island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia, 60 of whom remain trapped there after nearly two years – in the words of one migrant, “We are the parrots, we are in a cage.”
Les conséquences régionales et internationales de la crise Israël-Hamas
By Ferry de Kerckhove
L’attaque lancée par le Hamas le 7 octobre contre de malheureux Israéliens vivant le long de la soi-disant infranchissable barrière séparant l’État hébreu de la prison à ciel ouvert de Gaza laissera inévitablement des marques indélébiles dans la région avec de possibles incidences mondiales. Et la libération d’otages israéliens et palestiniens ne modifiera pas cette trajectoire.
Judges:
Madelaine Drohan is an award-winning author, editor and journalist who has covered business and politics in Canada, Europe and Africa during her 40-year career. She was the Canada correspondent for The Economist magazine from 2006 to 2019. Her book, Making a Killing: How and why corporations use armed force to do business, won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the National Business Book of the Year Award in 2004.
Kevin McMillan is a professor of international relations at the University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies, and since 2012 has co-coordinated the CIPS International Theory Network. His book, The Constitution of Social Practices, makes a case for a systematically historical and relational approach to the study of political behaviour.
Christina Clark-Kazak is a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. She is a bilingual research leader in forced migration and age rights, with broad experience in government, civil society, and academia. She has authored and (co-)edited 12 books, over 30 articles and book chapters, and many policy briefs and media interventions.
The previous winners of the award are:
- 2020: MBS admits “full responsibility” for the Khashoggi murder: What this means for the Kingdom’s allies by John Packer
- 2021: Bidenomics Signals the End of the Third Way in Economic Policy by Jacqueline Best
- 2022: The Politics of Travel Bans by Rita Abrahamsen
- 2023: Iran’s Revolution: Will the Islamic Regime Endure? by Farhad Rezaei
