2011 Recipient

The Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize, established in 1987 and sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph dealing with the international relations, foreign policy, or foreign-policy decision-making of any of the states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe published in the previous calendar year. The prize is dedicated to the encouragement of high-quality studies of the international behavior of the countries of the former Communist Bloc.

Winner: Lara J. Nettelfield
Title: Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Hague Tribunal’s Impact in a Postwar State (Cambridge University Press)

Lara J. Nettelfield’s Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Hague Tribunal’s Impact in a Postwar State makes a significant contribution to the study of transitional justice in the fields of international relations theory and international law. Through ethnographic research, interviews, and survey data, Nettlefield is able to demonstrate that the current scholarship on transitional justice too narrowly specifies the possible effects of international courts, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She shows that the court has had a range of positive effects on the ground in Bosnia and Herzegovina, even if they are not the effects theorized by scholars or even intended by the ICTY itself. Nettelfield’s work demonstrates the promise held out by multiple methodological approaches. Without her ethnographic sensibility, her years of on-the-ground soaking and poking, and her fielding a survey that had already been executed by other scholars in a different time and place, she never would have been able to redefine the way we think about the possible salutary effects of transitional justice.