2015 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: Valerie Sperling
Title: Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford University Press)

Valerie Sperling’s book, Sex, Politics, & Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia, is the definitive account of Russia’s extreme new gender regime. In this volume Sperling revisits the terrain of her earlier path-breaking book, Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering Transition (1999), in which she tracked the development of the Russian women’s movement as a lens onto the fraught democratization process in Russia. How things have changed, and yet remained the same! In Sex, Politics, & Putin, readers will find a fascinating and theoretically rich description of the current regime’s exploitation of feminism and homosexuality to create political legitimacy — an account that draws on a wealth of field interviews, case studies, social media resources, and Sperling’s long engagement with the topic of gender politics. Yet this is more than just a book about gender politics. Just as her earlier book anatomized and theorized the links between regime change and social activism in Yeltsin’s Russia, this newer work again sets the parameters for understanding civil society, legitimacy, and contentious politics in a re-authoritarianizing state.

Honorable Mentions: Yanni Kotsonis and Samuel A. Greene