2025 Recipient

Henry Thomson

Watching the Watchers: Communist Elites, the Secret Police and Social Order in Cold War Europe

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: Henry Thomson, Watching the Watchers: Communist Elites, the Secret Police and Social Order in Cold War Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2024)  

Henry Thomson’s Watching the Watchers addresses the puzzling relationship between security institutions, elite cohesion, and public compliance with authoritarian rule in the context of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. It asks why the communist secret police were powerful in some countries but relatively weak in others. The book provides a novel argument that the strength of the secret services and the degree of repression depended both on the cohesion of the ruling communist elite and the extent of Soviet interference in domestic affairs. Watching the Watchers also stands out for its methodological dexterity—combining comparative historical analysis with cross-national quantitative data—and for its ability to illuminate one of the most understudied facets of authoritarian governance. In doing so, it advances our understanding of how elite politics shape state security institutions, with important implications for both Cold War studies and the broader study of authoritarian regimes. 

Honorable Mention: Michele Rivkin-Fish

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