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Merze Tate Award

Nominations for the 2024 APSA Awards have closed.

The Merze Tate Award honors the best doctoral dissertation in the field of international relations, law, and politics.

The award is presented at the APSA Annual Meeting and carries a cash prize of $750. This award was previously known as the Helen Dwight Reid Award.

Nomination Information

Eligibility: Nominees do not have to be members of APSA, affiliated with an institution in the United States, or an American citizen in order to be considered for an award.

Dissertations must have been successfully defended within the previous two calendar years (dissertations for the 2024 award must be defended in 2022 or 2023).

Self-nominations are accepted. Nominations from non-PhD departments and institutions are also welcome if the nominee is currently employed there.

APSA will accept only one nomination for the Tate Award per school or political science department.

Amount:

Merze Tate Award Committee

Chair: Dr. Marybeth Peterson Ulrich
United States Naval War College
marybeth.ulrich@usnwc.edu

Professor Jonas Tallberg
Stockholm University
jonas.tallberg@statsvet.su.se

Listing of Awardees

Year	Author	Dissertation	Submitted by
2023	D.G. Kim	Anti-Asian Racism and the Racial Politics of U.S.-China Great Power Rivalry	University of California, San Diego
2022	Rachel Myrick	Partisan Polarization and International Politics	Stanford University
2021	Danielle Gilbert	The Logic of Coercive Kidnapping	George Washington University
2020	Erik Lin-Greenberg	Remote Controlled Restraint: The Effect of Remote Warfighting Technology on Crisis Escalation
2019	Ranjit Lall	Making International Organizations Work: The Politics of Institutional Performance	Harvard University
2018	Christoph Mikulaschek	The Power of the Weak: How Informal Power-Sharing Shapes the Work of the United Nations Security Council	Princeton University
2017	Rochelle Terman	Backlash: Defiance, Human Rights, and the Politics of Shame	University of California, Berkeley
2016	Melissa Lee	Mind the Gap? The International Sources of Sovereignty and State Weakness	Stanford University
2015	Nicholas Miller	Hegemony and Nuclear Proliferation	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2014	Joshua David Kertzer	Resolve in International Politics	Ohio State University
2013	Aila Matanock	International Insurance: Why Militant Groups and Governments Compete with Ballots Instead of Bullets	Stanford University
2012	Margaret E. Peters	Open Trade, Closed Borders: Immigration Policy in the Era of Globalization	Stanford University
2011	Daniel Levine	Critical Wrestlings: The Problem of Sustainable Critique in International Theory	Johns Hopkins University
2010	Stephen Craig Nelson	Creating Credibility: the International Monetary Fund and the Neoliberal Revolution in the Developing World	Cornell University
2009	Jessica Chen Weiss	Powerful Patriots: Nationalism, Dipolomacy, and the Strategic Logic of Anti-Foreign Protest	University of California, San Diego
2008	Margarita Hristoforova Petrova	Leadership Competition and the Creation of Norms	Cornell University
2007	Jason M.K. Lyall	Paths of Ruin: Why Revisionist States Arise and Die in World Politics	Cornell University
2006	Alexander B. Downes	Targeting Civilians in Wartime	University of Chicago
2005	Emilie Marie Hafner-Burton	Globalizing Human Rights? How International Trade Agreements Shape Government Repression	Nuffield College, Oxford University
2004	Helen M. Kinsella	The Image Before the Weapon: A Genealogy of the 'Civilian' in International Law and Politics	University of Minnesota
2003	Stephen G. Brooks	The Globalization of Production and International Security	Yale University
2002	Tanisha Fazal	Born to Lose and Doomed to Survive: State Death and Survival in the International System	Stanford University
2001	Jon C. Pevehouse	Democracy from Above? Regional Organizations and Democratization	University of Wisconsin, Madison

Award Background

The Helen Dwight Reid Award was awarded annually for the best dissertation successfully defended during the previous two years in the field of international relations, law, and politics. The Helen Dwight Reid Award was presented for the first time in 1966 and was originally sponsored by the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.

Minutes from APSA Council meetings at the time give little indication as to why Helen Dwight Reid was selected as the scholar for whom the award was named. However, Helen Dwight Reid was a friend and compatriot of the then-APSA Executive Director, Evron Kirkpatrick, and his wife, Jeanne Kirkpatrick. For many years, the award was funded by the Helen Dwight Reid Foundation, established in tribute to the Kirkpatricks, and for the purpose of “advance[ing] effective American leadership and engagement in ways that promote democratic development, human rights, and a just peace.”

About Helen Dwight Reid
Helen Dwight Reid’s primary contribution to scholarship was International Servitudes in Law and Practice, published in 1932 by the University of Chicago Press. Her book catalogs and classifies “international servitudes”, which are agreements among independent states “whereby the territory of one state is made liable to permanent use by another state, for some specified purpose” (p. 25). These include, among others, agreements about the use of natural resources, fishing rights, transit routes, military bases, and demilitarized zones. Reid argues that these agreements facilitate redistribution of resources without limiting sovereignty.

Renaming the Award
In 2010, the Helen Dwight Reid Foundation ceased to exist, and sponsorship of the award ended. The APSA Council constituted a committee to consider renaming and refunding options for the Helen Dwight Reid Award in 2015. The Committee was chaired by Brett Ashley Leeds, Rice University, and included David Bearce, Erica Chenoweth, Mark Crescenzi, Juliet Johnson, and Laura Sjoberg.

At the 2015 Annual Meeting, the committee developed criteria for a new name of the award, then charged each committee member to brainstorm candidate names. The committee members evaluated the resulting candidates based on the criteria they had established. After discussion, the committee unanimously decided to support a recommendation that the Helen Dwight Reid Award be renamed the Merze Tate Award. Merze Tate’s name was originally brought to the attention of the committee by Paula McClain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University. The APSA Council unanimously adopted the committee’s recommendation at its spring 2016 meeting in Chicago, IL.

About Merze Tate
Merze Tate was the first African American woman studying international relations to receive a doctoral degree in Government (1941, Radcliffe). She published many books and articles, including The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for a Limitation of Armaments to 1907 (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1942), The United States and Armaments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), and The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).

Most of her career was spent as a professor of History at Howard University, although she also traveled as a foreign correspondent. Tate and her work have been profiled in such publications as PS: Political Science and Politics (profile written by Maurice C. Woodard and published in the January 2005 issue) and White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations, by Robert Vitalis (Cornell University Press, 2015). Tate is the subject of at least one intellectual biography in progress.

In choosing to name the award after Merze Tate, the committee noted that “her perseverance in the face of significant structural obstacles is inspiring and particularly meaningful for a dissertation award.”