The Arthur Ross Book Award . The annual Arthur Ross Book Award recognizes books that make an outstanding contribution to the understanding of foreign policy or international relations. The prize, endowed by Arthur Ross in 2001, is for nonfiction works (including biography) from the past two years, in English or translation, that merit special attention for:
* bringing forth new information that can change our understanding of events or problems;
* developing analytical approaches that allow new and different insights into a key issue;
* or providing new ideas to help resolve foreign-policy problems.
The award consists of a $30,000 first prize, a $15,000 second prize, and a $7,500 honorable mention.
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2009 Winners of the Arthur Ross Book Award:
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Gold Medal Philip P. Pan, Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (Simon & Schuster)- More than fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union, China is engaged in the largest experiment in authoritarianism in the world. By launching market reforms while continuing to restrict political freedom, the Chinese Communist Party has challenged the Western assumption that economic growth must lead to political liberalization - an assumption at the core of UK and American foreign policy. At the same time, the struggle for democratic change is reaching a crescendo, marking a moment in the history of modern China as uncertain and consequential as the rise of Mao's cult of personality, or the run-up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. From the booming cities of Beijing and Shanghai to the rural communities of the vast countryside, this ground-breaking book introduces us to some of the courageous people who are dedicated to more
Silver Medal Ahmed Rashid - Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (Penguin Group) -
After September 11th , Ahmed Rashid’s crucial book Taliban introduced American readers to that now notorious regime. In this new work, he returns to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia to review the catastrophic aftermath of America’s failed war on terror. Called “Pakistan’s best and bravest reporter” by Christopher Hitchens, Rashid has shown himself to be a voice of reason amid the chaos of present-day Central Asia. Descent Into Chaos is his blistering critique of American policy—a dire warning and an impassioned call to correct these disasterous strategies before these failing states threaten global stability and bring devastation to our world.
About the Author
Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist based in Lahore who writes for the The Washington Post, Daily Telegraph (London), the International Herald Tribune, The New York Review of Books, BBC Online, and The Nation. His previous books include Jihad, Taliban, and The Resurgence of Cetral Asia. He appears regularly on NPR, CNN, and the BBC World Service. --
Honorable Mention Gareth Evans - The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Brookings Institution Press)
- After the Holocaust, the world vowed it would never again permit such mass atrocity crimes, yet many have since gone unchecked, from the killing fields of Cambodia to the machetes of Rwanda to the ongoing nightmare in Darfur. Gareth Evans, president of the International Crisis Group, explains this lack of government action. In a more hopeful vein, however, he also shows how the emergence of a new international norm can protect the peoples of the world from mass crimes. The Responsibility to Protect (or R2P) concept was born in 2001 and embraced at the UN World Summit in 2005. The heart of this new international norm is the belief that if sovereign governments fail to protect their own people from genocide, ethnic cleansing, or other major crimes against humanity, then the wider international community must take whatever action is appropriate. The new norm emphasizes assistance and prevention, not coercion, but it also accepts that it is sometimes right to fight. More
About the Author
Gareth Evans is co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament. Evans is former president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, a leading international nongovernmental organization advising on conflict prevention and resolution. He came to ICG in 2000, after eight years as Australia's foreign minister.No one could be more qualified to write this book. Evans co-chaired the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty that initiated the Responsibility to Protect idea in 2001, and he was a member of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel that in 2004 proposed its adoption by the World Summit. He won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas ImprovingWorld Order for his 1994 Foreign Policy article, Cooperative Security and Intra-State Conflict
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2008 Gold Medal – Paul Collier for The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It - In this elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty, economist Paul Collier writes persuasively that although nearly five billion of the world's people are beginning to climb from desperate poverty and to benefit from globalization's reach to developing countries, there is a "bottom billion" of the world's poor whose countries, largely immune to the forces of global economy, are falling farther behind and are in danger of falling apart, separating permanently and tragically from the rest of the world more
2008 Silver Medal – Trita Parsi for Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States- In this era of superheated rhetoric and vitriolic exchanges between the leaders of Iran and Israel, the threat of nuclear violence looms. But the real roots of the enmity between the two nations mystify Washington policymakers, and no promising pathways to peace have emerged. This book traces the shifting relations among Israel, Iran, and the United States from 1948 to the present, uncovering for the first time the details of secret alliances, treacherous acts, and unsavoury political manoeuvrings that have undermined Middle Eastern stability and disrupted U.S. foreign policy initiatives in the region. more
2008 Honorable Mention – Robert Dallek for Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power - In this epic and revelatory joint biography, one of America's most distinguished historians probes the lives and times of two unlikely leaders whose partnership dominated the world stage and changed the course of history. Tapping into a wealth of recently declassified documents and tapes, Robert Dallek uncovers fascinating details about Nixon and Kissinger's tumultuous personal relationship and the extent to which they struggled to outdo each other in the reach for foreign policy achievements. More
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2007 Gold Medal – Kwame Anthony Appiah for Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers - Reviving the ancient philosophy of "Cosmopolitanism," a school of thought that dates to the Cynics of the fourth century BCE, Appiah traces its influence through history to show how Western intellectuals and leaders have wildly exaggerated the power of difference--and neglected the power of one. More
2007 Silver Medal – Robert L. Beisner for Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War - Dean Acheson was one of the most influential secretaries of state in U.S. history, presiding over American foreign policy during a pivotal era which saw the Marshall Plan and the establishment of NATO.More
2007 Honorable Mention – Thomas E. Ricks for Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005- Cutting through the headlines and spin, this is the first book to give us a true picture of the reality on the ground, through the words of the people there - from commanders to intelligence officers, army doctors to ordinary soldiers. Providing eye-witness accounts that contradict the official stories and figures, they give a chilling picture of the deceit, stupidity, wishful thinking, lack of forward planning and total intellectual failure of those behind the invasion. The result is an extraordinary new insight into the plight of ordinary soldiers doing nightmarish jobs, and the real nature of the fighting in Iraq. More
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2006 Gold Medal – Tony Judt for Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945- Europe in 1945 was prostrate. Much of the continent was devastated by war, mass slaughter, bombing and chaos. Large areas of Eastern Europe were falling under Soviet control, exchanging one despotism for another. Today, the Soviet Union is no more and the democracies of the European Union reach as far as the borders of Russia itself. "Postwar" tells the rich and complex story of how we got from there to here. It tells of Europe's recovery from the devastation; of the decline and fall of Soviet Communism and the rise of the EC and EU; of the end of Europe's empires; and of Europe's uneasy and changing relationships with the memory of the war and with the two great powers that bracket it, Russian and America more
2006 Silver Medal – Olivier Roy for Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah- A schism has emerged between mainstream Islamist movements in the Muslim world (e.g. Hamas of Palestine and Hezbullah of Lebanon) and the uprooted militants who strive to establish an imaginary ummah, or Muslim community, not embedded in any particular society or territory. Roy provides a detailed comparison of these transnational movements, whether peaceful, like Tabligh Jamaat and the Islamic brotherhoods, or violent, like Al Qaeda. Neofundamentalism, he argues, is both a product and an agent of globalization. More
2006 Honorable Mention – George Packer for The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq - Named one of the Best Books of 2005 by "The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review," and more, this volume recounts how the United States set about changing the history of the Middle East and became ensnared in a guerrilla war in Iraq. More
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2005 Gold Medal – Steve Coll for Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001- The news-breaking book that has sent schockwaves through the White House, Ghost Wars is the most accurate and revealing account yet of the CIA's secret involvement in al-Qaeada's evolution. Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and interviewed senior US officials and foreign spymasters. More
2005 Silver Medal – Stephen Biddle for Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle- "Stephen Biddle's "Military Power" is one of the most important contributions to strategic studies in recent decades. Presenting a very powerful case for a very surprising argument on a very important question, it will be controversial in some quarters, but critics will be hard-pressed to refute the case."--Richard K. Betts, Columbia University, author of "Military Readiness" More
2005 Honorable Mention – James Mann for Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet
2004 Gold Medal – Daniel Benjamin, Steven Simon for The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam's War Against America
2004 Silver Medal – Robert Cooper for The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century
2004 Honorable Mention – Ivo H. Daalder, James M. Lindsay for America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy
2003 Gold Medal – Samantha Power for A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
2003 Silver Medal – Margaret Macmillan for Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
2003 Honorable Mention – Philip Bobbitt for The Shield of Achilles
2002 Gold Medal – Robert Skidelsky for John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman
2002 Silver Medal – Lawrence Freedman for Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam
2002 Honorable Mention – Walter Russell Mead, Richard C. Leone for Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
