2012 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: Roger D. Peterson
Title: Western Intervention in the Balkans: The Strategic Use of Emotion in Conflict (Cambridge University Press)

This important work argues that Western interventions in the Balkans have been hampered by a failure to understand the role of emotion in ethnic conflict. Roger Petersen seeks to rectify this by analyzing emotions as resources that can be mobilized by political entrepreneurs in the pursuit of political strategies and by exploring the conditions under which different emotions can be exploited in this way. He illustrates his argument with a series of well-researched Balkan case studies. Extensively grounded in the literature on ethnic conflict and international intervention, Western Intervention in the Balkans has important implications for theory as well as for policymaking.

Honorable Mention: Sean McMeekin