2020 CPSA Prize in Comparative Politics

Winner: Rauna Kuokkanen

Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance, and Gender (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Excerpt from jury report: Kuokkanen’s beautifully written, theoretically innovative, and empirically original book examines Indigenous self-determination in comparative perspective. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Indigenous women in Canada, Greenland, and Sapmi (Scandinavia), Kuokannen advances a feminist conception of Indigenous self-determination as nested within a range of relations of non-denomination. She persuasively shows that self-determination requires not only an end to state violence against Indigenous peoples, but also an end to gender violence. The book also demonstrates how, despite cross-national variation in contemporary Indigenous institutions, settler state policies across countries continue to entrench colonial relations of domination.