Perry World House and Foreign Affairs Announce Winners of 2020 Emerging Scholars Global Policy Prize

The University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House and Foreign Affairs Magazine are pleased to announce the winners of their Emerging Scholars Global Policy Prize.

The competition promotes and publishes scholars dedicated to making new academic research on significant global issues accessible to policymakers. After rigorous review of dozens of entries, which included the original scholarship and new written submissions, we finalized two prizes of $10,000 each to the University of Oregon’s Yeling Tan and Georgia State’s Dan Altman.

“The only thing more exciting about this contest than our partnership with Foreign Affairs was the remarkable submissions we received across a range of academic disciplines,” said Michael Horowitz, Director of Perry World House and Richard Perry Professor of Political Science. “In a crowded competition and during a dynamic time in the world, these two essays distinguished themselves not only for the novelty of the research but also for the outstanding quality of the writing and potential for impact in policy debates.”

In fall 2019, Perry World House partnered with Foreign Affairs, the preeminent outlet for analysis and debate of foreign policy, economics, and global affairs, to encourage scholars to translate their own academic work to be more accessible to policymakers. By limiting eligibility to junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students, the prize supports and provides a unique publishing opportunity for emerging scholars.

“We’re delighted to partner with Perry World House on a prize that supports innovative research in international affairs,” said Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Executive Editor of Foreign Affairs. “We look forward to sharing the exceptional work of this year’s prize winners with the readers of Foreign Affairs, and to following the work of the many scholars whose submissions offered fresh insight into the world’s most pressing challenges.”

The winners of the Emerging Scholars Global Policy Prize, which will be published with Foreign Affairs in the months ahead, are:

“Disaggregating ‘China, Inc.’” by Yeling Tan, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon

After wide predictions that China’s accession into the World Trade Organization in 2001 would lead to greater reforms and liberalization in the country, many have been disappointed two decades later. However, in this new article, Tan argues China’s WTO entry sparked an intensification of different economic governance strategies that had long had an uneasy coexistence within its system. She concludes that any policy or predictions based on wholesale characterizations of, or changes in, the country are bound to be frustrated.

“The Future of Territorial Conquest” by Dan Altman, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University

Although the relationship between conquest and war may seem traditionally and intellectually straightforward, in this essay Altman finds that more and more, conquest has come to operate on a different logic: first seize a piece of territory, then try to avoid war. Today, conquest looks like what Russia has done in Crimea and what China is attempting in the South China Sea.