Professor Christopher Coker (28 March 1953-5 September 2023)

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our former colleague and friend Professor Christopher Coker.

His passing is a great loss not only to the Department of International Relations, LSE IDEAS, and LSE, but also to the UK and NATO military education and strategic planning communities. 

Professor Coker worked in the Department of International Relations for over 40 years before retiring in 2019, but he continued as Director of LSE IDEAS until his death. As well as writing extensively on all aspects of war, he taught and mentored countless students who remember his individuality and humour with fondness.

You can read the announcement of Professor Coker's passing from LSE IDEAS here.

You can leave your memories and messages on a Memorial Page here.

You can also leave your memories and messages on the LSE Condolences blog here.

Book Award News

Congratulations to our award-winning faculty members:

• Tomila Lankina's book The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class has won the 2023 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies for outstanding monograph on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography.
  
  This book is also the winner of the J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association.
  
  Tomila's book also received “Honorable Mention” for the Sartori Book Award of the American Political Science Association Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. The Giovanni Sartori Book Award honours Giovanni Sartori's work on qualitative methods and concept formation.
• Katharine Millar has been awarded the Canadian Political Science Association 2023 Prize for best book in International Relations for her new book Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender and Political Community.
  
  Katharine Millar has also been awarded Honourable Mention for the British International Studies Association's LMH Ling Prize for Best First Book for her new book Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender and Political Community.

Congratulations to our IR VIP Award Winners

We are very pleased to announce that our Department Manager Andrew Sherwood has won the 'Inspirational Leadership' award at the LSE Values in Practice Award Ceremony 2023. These awards celebrate Professional Services staff who have shown outstanding contribution or commitment to the School.

Department Affairs Co-ordinator Romy Mokogwu was runner up in the 'Valuing People' category and Andrew Sherwood was commended.

Several other members of the IR PSS team were also nominated for these awards.

Congratulations to those who won and were nominated!

LSESU Teaching Awards Winners 2023

Congratulations to both Dr Federica Bicchi, who received the Award for Staff/Student Partnership, and to Dr Katharine Millar who received the Award for PhD Supervision!

Read the full list of winners

LSE Class Teacher Awards 2023

LSE Class Teacher Awards are given to Graduate Teaching Assistants, Teaching Fellows and Guest Teachers in recognition of their very special contribution to teaching at LSE. They are organised by the LSE Eden Centre.

Congratulations to PhD Candidates Eva Leth Sørensen and Sophie Kaldor, and LSE Fellow Kira Huji for their LSE Class Teacher Awards!

Read the full list of winners

LSE Politics and International Relations ranked fourth in 2023 world university rankings by subject

LSE Politics and International Relations has been ranked fourth in the QS World University Ranking by Subject 2023 tables for Politics and International Studies, ahead of Princeton, Stanford, Cambridge University, and Yale.

We are also second in the UK!

Scores take into account academic and employer reputation surveys, along with citations per faculty.

See rankings
See methodology and more information

Congratulations to Mathias Koenig-Archibugi who has been awarded an ESRC Grant

We're delighted to announce that Dr Mathias Koenig-Archibugi has been awarded an ESRC Standard Grant for an interdisciplinary research project on The Global Governance of Antimicrobial Resistance: An Empirical Analysis of Participation and Effectiveness.

Congratulations to our winners of the LSE Excellence in Education Awards 2022

We are thrilled to announce the following members of Department of International Relations PSS and faculty have been awarded LSE Excellence in Education Awards in 2022:

Faculty: Sinja Graf, Nikhil Kalyanpur, Kate Millar, Victoria Paniagua, Theresa Squatrito, Jurgen Haacke, Milli Lake, Tomila Lankina and Luca Tardelli

PSS Team: Ellis Kerby and Joyce Harvey

Designed to support the School’s aspiration of creating ‘a culture where excellence in teaching is valued and rewarded on a level with excellence in research’, the Excellence in Education Awards are made, on the recommendations of Heads of Department and Divisions, to staff who have demonstrated outstanding teaching contribution and educational leadership in their departments.

Find out more

Congratulations to our 2021/22 Undergraduate Prizewinners!

We are proud to announce the BSc prizewinners for the 2020/21 session.

Read full details about the winners and prizes

Congratulations to IR Fellow Dr Seebal Aboudounya awarded a prestigious international award

Dr Seebal Aboudounya has been awarded a prestigious African Women Award for being a 'She Achiever in International Relations'.

The award is for her achievements in International Relations, and specifically for being ‘an outstanding African Woman Achiever in International Relations’.

Congratulations to Dr Pilar Elizalde who has won the BISA Award for Early Career Excellence in Teaching International Studies!

We are thrilled to announce that LSE Fellow Dr Pilar Elizalde has been awarded the BISA Award for Early Career Excellence in Teaching International Studies at the 2022 BISA Conference. The aim of this annual award is to recognise those early career academics, who have contributed to the positive learning experience of students in International Studies within the first five years of their career. 

The judges said: “Pilar stood out because the evidence provided included more than simply module evaluation questionnaire comments/results. There was significant evidence of a positive contribution to learning, including a department award, the use of innovative teaching strategies to address the challenges of teaching under the conditions of COVID-19, meeting the needs of a diverse student population, sharing of good practice with her colleagues, and stimulating independent learning and critical thinking. The building of a student community and her recognition of that is impressive.”

Find out more here

Congratulations to our IR LSE Class Teacher Award recipients!

LSE Class Teacher Awards are given to Graduate Teaching Assistants, Teaching Fellows and Guest Teachers in recognition of their very special contribution to teaching at LSE. Seven of our Fellows and Graduate Teaching Assistants are recipients in 2022.

Winners: Irene Morlino, Sophie Rosenberg, Elisa Gambino

Highly Commended: Jacklyn Majnemer, Meg O'Mahony, Agnes Yu, Chris Deacon

More information here

Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 results are here!

Our research was submitted with the Department of Government to the Politics and International Studies Unit of Assessment. 57.7 percent of the research outputs for this Unit were rated 'world-leading' and a further 33.3 percent were rated ‘internationally excellent’.

Find out more

Congratulations to Robert Falkner whose book has been shortlisted for the BISA Susan Strange Best Book Award 2022 

Robert Falkner's book Environmentalism and Global International Society (CUP) has been shortlisted for the British International Studies Association Susan Strange Best Book Award 2022.

The Susan Strange Best Book Prize is awarded for an outstanding book published in any field of International Studies. The aim of the Prize is to honour the work of Susan Strange and to recognise outstanding current work being conducted in the discipline.

The winner will be announced at the BISA annual conference in June.

Find out more

Women's International Thought public exhibition
5 May - 2 September 2022

LSE Library are delighted to be the hosts of a new public exhibition on “Women’s International Thought”, which launches on 5 May and will be open until 2 September 2022.

This exhibition explores the ideas, genres, and contexts of women’s international thinking in Britain and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. A period of colonial and anti-colonial struggles, superpower rivalry, racial, class and gendered conflicts, the legacies of these times – and these women’s ideas - are still with us today.

Curated by the Leverhulme Project on Women and the History of International Thought, the exhibition explores women international thinkers and their work at a fundamental moment in the imagining of international relations.

Find out more

Marco Lam Blog prizewinner 2022

We're pleased to announce that this year's Marco Lam blog prize has been awarded to Anqi Sun (1^st year BSc Politics and International Relations) who writes on the subject of "What lessons, if any, can we draw from the international response to the COVID-19 pandemic for global governance on climate change?"

Read the winning blog

Alumnus Kian Gohar (MSc IR 2000) publishes a post-pandemic book on Competing in the New World of Work

Entrepreneur and MSc IR graduate 2000 Kian Gohar has recently co-written a book ‘Competing in the New World of Work‘ (Harvard Business Review 2022).

On our blog he talks about his book and how studying IR led him to become a published author.

Read more on our blog

William A Callahan's book Sensible Politics wins ISA's International Political Sociology Best Book Award 2022

Congratulations to Professor William A. Callahan, whose book Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations won the Best Book Award 2022 of the ISA's International Political Sociology section.

The Committee was impressed with the book’s interdisciplinarity and contributions to fields such as feminist theory and border studies; for its transformation of ‘ways of seeing’ in IR and its non-conventional archive of visual artifacts; its non-Eurocentric empirical and theoretical registers; and its contributions to ‘doing’ theory through a range of creative visual practices.

Congratulations to our MSc Prizewinners 2020/21

We're thrilled to announce the IR MSc dissertation prizewinners for 2020/21! You can also find out more about their dissertations and read their abstracts via the blog post link below.

Congratulations to:

• Julian Erben and Ana Lankes - joint winners of the Philip Windsor Dissertation Prize
• Bingzhen Song - Martin Wight Dissertation Prize
• Leonardo De Agostini - Fred Halliday Dissertation Prize
• Monica Jade Lung and Sonja Schaefer - joint winners of the Susan Strange Dissertation Prize

We also send our congratulations to Anand Sundar, winner of the Michael Donelan Prize for the highest mark in the IR410 International Politics core course.

Find out more in the blog post

Student papers online: British Foreign Policy Post-Brexit: Pursuing a New Role for 'Global Britain'?

In what ways has Brexit impacted British foreign policy? By tracking and assessing new directions and traditional roles in British foreign policy, this new collection of papers by LSE Master's students addresses this question by scrutinising post-Brexit British foreign policy from the date of departure on 1 January 2020 to Spring 2021.

Find out more and read the BRIFPO papers

Comments from our External Examiners 2019/20

"Student performance was excellent! I enjoyed reading the rich material I was sent to moderate. Of course, student performance is facilitated by quality teaching which is in clear evidence."

Read the comments on our programmes of study from the external examiners for 2019/20

Congratulations to Katrina Lambert, recipient of a Diana Award 2021

We're very proud of Katrina Lambert, 2nd year BSc Politics and International Relations student, for her amazing work and prestigious Diana Award in recognition of her social action and humanitarian work - "an unstoppable advocate for the voices of young people".

Read the roll of honour 2021

LSE Politics/International Relations ranked fourth in 2022 Complete University Guide Rankings by subject

LSE Politics and International Relations has been ranked fourth in the Complete University Guide Rankings by Subject 2022 league table for Politics/International Relations.

Overall LSE is 3rd in the UK and ranked second both for graduate prospects and research quality.

Find out more

LSE-led project selected for funding by CIVICA 

An international and interdisciplinary team guided by Tomila Lankina as Principal Investigator, and formed by PhD candidate Giovanni Angioni and others from partner universities has been awarded a CIVICA grant for the project “The Long Shadow of Educational, Skills, and Professional Inequities in Time and in Space: Implications for Polarization and Support for Populism in Europe.”

Drawing on data and archival material from historical contexts as diverse as Tzarist Russia, medieval and present-day Italy, the project aims to contribute to academic debate and policy on the drivers of inequality and political polarisation, and the long-term social consequences of historical shocks like famines and epidemics. Read more about the project.

Professor Tomila Lankina is a winner of the LSE Student Union Teaching Awards 2021

Congratulations to Professor Tomila Lankina who has received the Award for PhD Supervision in the LSESU Teaching Awards 2021. These are student-nominated awards.

Congratulations also to Alireza Shams Lahijani and Marnie Howlett who were highly commended for 'Exceptional Teaching in an Unprecedented Year'. 

Read the full list of winners

Congratulations to Ed Unwin, named LSE Student Volunteer of the Year 2021, and five other students from the department were nominated

We are thrilled to learn that Ed Unwin, a second year BSc IR student, has been named LSE Student Volunteer of the Year. Ed's voluntary work at City Year UK has provided a pathway for the charity to support more pupils and young adults. 

Also congratulations to the five other students from the department who were also nominated for their volunteering: Dowon Kim (BSc IR and History), Noah Gershon (BSc Politics and IR), Pauline Reineke (MSc IR), Rory Moore (BSc IR) and Tanya Marwaha (BSc IR and Chinese).

Read more about all their work here.

The Wealth Effect: The Wealth Effect. How the Great Expectations of the Middle Class Have Changed the Politics of Banking Crises wins ISA IPE best book award 2021

Congratulations to Jeffrey Chwieroth (LSE) and Andrew Walter (University of Melbourne, formerly LSE) whose book The Wealth Effect. How the Great Expectations of the Middle Class Have Changed the Politics of Banking Crises (2019, Cambridge University Press) has won the International Studies Association International Political Economy Best Book Award 2021.

Sensible Politics shortlisted for the BISA Susan Strange Best Book Prize

Congratulations to William A Callahan whose book Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations (Oxford University Press) has been shortlisted for the 2021 BISA Susan Strange Best Book Prize.

The Susan Strange Best Book Prize is awarded for an outstanding book published in any field of International Studies. The aim of the Prize is to honour the work of Susan Strange (who was Montague Burton Chair at LSE) and to recognise outstanding current work being conducted in the discipline. 

Find out more.

For more on the book visit SensiblePolitics.net

Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship

Huge congratulations to Dr Katerina Dalacoura who has been awarded one of the Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowships for her research on The International Thought of Turkish Islamists: History, Civilisation and Nation.

Lee Ann Fujii Award

Congratulations to Milli Lake whose book Strong NGOs and Weak States: Pursuing Gender Justice in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa was awarded the inaugural Lee Ann Fujii Award by the International Studies Association. This award commemorates Lee Ann’s memory as a tireless advocate for diversity, mentorship and research ethics in the discipline.

LSE100 Prizes for academic achievement in the 2019 cohort

We are delighted that the following IR students have received an LSE100 Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement in the 2019 cohort:

• Anya Magotra
• Zhi Feng Ong
• Zheng Xu

These awards are given to those students who receive marks of Distinction in all four assessments on LSE100. They are a reflection of exemplary work across these demanding assignments and this year’s winners are in the top 6% of students in the entire undergraduate cohort that completed the course in 2019.

Book Awards - congratulations to Karen E Smith, George Lawson and Jeffrey Chwieroth

Professor Karen E. Smith's recent co-authored book Group Politics in UN Multilateralism has been awarded the Academic Council on the UN System Biennial Book Award for 2020.

This book was recognised for its new perspective on diplomacy and negotiations at the UN. This recognises that group dynamics and shifting, ad-hoc groupings around issues are key to understanding diplomatic practice at the UN. 

Dr George Lawson's book Anatomies of Revolution was awarded the Hedley Bull Prize. This award by the European Consortium for Political Research recognises one book each year which makes a substantial and original contribution to theory and/or empirical studies in any field of International Relations.

You can read the jury's full remarks, as well as Dr Lawson's own comments on the ECPR web page.

Professor Jeffrey Chwieroth's book The Wealth Effect: How the Great Expectations of the Middle Class Have Changed the Politics of Banking Crises, co-authored with Professor Andrew Walter from the University of Melbourne, was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research by the European Consortium for Political Research. 

The jury described the book as a ‘masterful’ long-term analysis of the politics of banking crises. Read their full remarks on the ECPR web page.

BISA's Distinguished Contribution Prize 2020 is awarded to Emeritus Professor Margot Light

Margot Light is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at LSE. She has been an authoritative scholarly voice on Soviet and Russian foreign policy since the 1980s. Informed by a deep knowledge of Russia’s politics, culture and language, Margot’s work has also been sensitive to broader, theoretical developments. Her first book The Soviet Theory of International Relations was followed by others, edited and co-authored, analysing the internal and external factors that shape Russia’s approach to the world. Early in her career Margot co-edited two state of the art books on IR theory (International Relations: A Handbook of Current Theory, ed. Margot Light and A.J.R. Groom – was republished by Bloomsbury in 2016) and has written widely on ethical, normative and gender issues in IR. 

Margot has also played a leading role in nurturing younger scholars and in supporting women in the profession. She co-convened the first course in the UK dedicated to the study of women in international relations and set up the LSE Women group – a forerunner of #LSEWomen. Margot was Director of the Human Rights Programme in the Commonwealth of Independent States based in the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at LSE from 2006–2016.  

Find out more

Read an interview with her about life and teaching

COVID-19 writing and research

Our staff and students are helping people and governments better COVID-19's implications for international affairs, from the importance of physical touch to its impact on energy policy.

Read their contributions to this global discussion

New grant for Middle East religious diversity study

The $350,000 award, the Henry Luce Foundation's first gift to LSE, is in support of the 3 year project ‘Managing Religious Diversity in the Middle East: The Muhasasa Ta’ifia in Iraq, 2003-2018’, which will be headed by Professor Toby Dodge of LSE International Relations and LSE Middle East Centre.

Find out more

Congratulations to Professor William A Callahan!

His article "The Politics of Walls: Barriers, Flows and the Sublime"(2018) has won the Best Article of the Year Prize from BISA and the Review of International Studies.

Read the article

Read a summary on the LSE US Centre blog

Alumni News

LSE IR and History graduate (2016) Suyin Haynes spent a two day journey by train, spanning six countries and 1,200 miles with teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg - and heard how she made the whole world listen.

Her report is the feature article in Time 27 May 2019 issue.

Read it here

LSE to lead £15m research hub to promote gender equality

The LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security (WPS) will lead a new coalition of research institutions addressing gendered injustice and insecurity around the world.

Members of the IR Department faculty, Kirsten Ainley is Co-Director and Deputy Principal Investigator, while Milli Lake is a Co-Investigator. 

Receiving £15.2m over five years through the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub will work extensively with civil society groups, practitioners, governments and international organisations to advance gender justice and inclusive peace in developing nations.

More information

Gender, Justice and Security Hub

New video:
The Simulation Game: EU Human Rights Diplomacy in the UN

In November 2018, LSE students took part in the simulation of a meeting of an EU committee on the UN, to prepare the EU’s position on human rights issues within the UN. The simulation was an activity of the EUNNET programme, an EU-funded network on teaching and research on the EU and the UN.

Watch it here.

Gender and bias in the International Relations curriculum: Insights from reading lists

by Kiran Phull, Gokhan Ciflikli and Gustav Meibauer

Following growing academic interest and activism targeting gender bias in university curricula, the authors present the first analysis of female exclusion in a complete International Relations curriculum, across degree levels and disciplinary subfields. The IR curriculum as LSE was used as a dataset. The paper is based on the work of the IR PhD-led Gender & Diversity Project.

Read or download the paper here.

Foreign Policy Magazine/TRIP list of best International Relations Schools in the world

Thank you to the 1500 scholars who contributed to the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project, and who voted the LSE as top UK institution for Masters Programmes for Policy Career in International Relations.

They also voted for LSE in the top 15 PhD Programmes for Academic Career in International Relations.

Foreign Policy's best International Relations Schools in the world

Jens Meierhenrich, Associate Professor of IR, has been appointed co-editor of Cambridge Studies in Law and Society

The venerable book series at Cambridge University Press was founded in 1997. Cambridge Studies in Law and Society is a hub for leading scholarship in socio-legal studies. Located at the intersection of law, the humanities, and the social sciences, it publishes empirically innovative and theoretically sophisticated work on law's manifestations in everyday life: from discourses to practices, and from institutions to cultures.

Information about the book series here

Kim Wall - IR Department alumnus

The Department of International Relations is extremely saddened to learn of the death of Swedish journalist Kim Wall.  Kim studied for the BSc in International Relations in the IR Department and graduated in 2011, before going on to complete a masters degree at Columbia University and becoming a freelance journalist.

Her former Academic Mentor at the LSE, Dr Alex Prichard, remembers her well.  He writes that she was "a really lovely person, as well as an excellent student with ambition and ability, who was determined to pursue a career in journalism". All who knew her praised her dedication to her work, her inquisitiveness and engagement. 

The department sends its deepest sympathies to Kim's family and friends.