2017 Recipient

The Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies, established in 2008 and sponsored by the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.

Winner: Juliet Johnson
Title: Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World (Cornell University Press)

When are central bankers more than just central bankers? When they are revolutionaries! The study of politics and economics in the post-socialist space has swung of late from transition to backsliding, and from integration to disintegration. In Priests of Prosperity, however, Juliet Johnson swings back. Eschewing the large-scale, birds-eye views and accepted dogmas of political science, Johnson delivers a deeply researched and theoretically significant study of the everyday processes of international policy diffusion – and its consequences. Drawing on more than 160 interviews and covering five countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Johnson provides an exploration of the mechanisms and pathways through which crucial post-socialist policymakers came to think and act in ways that were more global than local, navigating conflicting identities, loyalties and interests in the process. As such, Priests of Prosperity is a compendium of rare achievements: a study tackling an incredibly complex topic in an accessible way; a deeply qualitative approach to a field usually reduced to quantitative abstraction; and a grounded area-studies exercise that can and will shape broader disciplinary debates. For these achievements, the committee is pleased to award the Davis Center Prize to Juliet Johnson.

Honorable Mention: Rebecca Gould