2025

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. 

Honorable Mention: Michele Rivkin-Fish, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024) 

Michele Rivkin-Fish’s Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture provides a timely and well-documented account of family planning policy in the USSR and contemporary Russia, focusing on abortion and contraception. It demonstrates how the Russian government under Vladimir Putin’s regime has attempted to “unmake” the Soviet era reliance on abortion as contraception by undermining reproductive rights altogether. Taking up a topic of urgent contemporary importance, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture argues that this biopolitics has important implications not only for the future of Russia’s demographics but also for understanding the country’s crisis of liberalism in light of both neoliberal and illiberal challenges. It sheds light on the rise of the pro-natalist movement as part of the nationalist agenda of Putin’s autocratic regime as well as efforts to combat pro-natalism.

Winner: Henry Thomson

Prize Committee: Pauline Jones (chair), Edward Holland, and Lenka Bustikova-Siroky