2019 Prize in International Relations

Winner: Sylvia Bashevkin

Women as Foreign Policy Leaders – National Security and Gender Politics in Superpower America, Oxford 2018

Photo: Sylvia Bashevkin (University of Toronto) and Juliet Johnson (McGill University – jury member) | June 5, 2019 | CPSA President’s Dinner | Sheraton Wall Centre, Vancouver

Excerpt from jury report: Sylvia Bashevkin’s Women as Foreign Policy Leaders breaks new ground in IR scholarship by challenging deep-seated assumptions about female leadership and gender relations in high-level diplomacy. Bashevkin draws upon insights from feminist diplomatic history and case studies of four top U.S. female national security officials across different presidential administrations to argue that women in positions of diplomatic power transcend pacifist gender stereotypes. All four women – Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Rodham Clinton – had long track records of forceful, decisive leadership before rising to top positions, and once in power acted to assertively and effectively shape U.S. national security policy despite facing gender-based critiques and discrimination. Theoretically rich and engagingly written, Women as Foreign Policy Leaders exemplifies the central importance of feminist IR scholarship to the discipline of political science.