The Merze Tate Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in the field of international relations, law, and politics.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Jan Eijking’s dissertation, “A World from Nowhere: Nineteenth-Century Expert Politics and the Technocratic International,” examines the 19th century rise of expert-driven international projects and institutions. The author theorizes processes of ‘domain differentiation’—the delineation of a sphere of political action to be driven by technical expertise—and focuses on how key differentiators shielded international projects from political oversight. The dissertation begins with careful theory building, before moving to an examination of political thinkers arguing for domain differentiation (Bentham, Mill, Saint-Simon, and Chevalier), and, finally, turns to three historical cases. From the first World Fairs in the 1850s to the construction of the Suez Canal from 1834-1869 and the International Telegraph Conference of 1865, the author persuasively demonstrates how domain differentiation justified unprecedented cross-border engineering projects that were made unaccountable to concerns about dispossession and informal empire. The committee noted the richness of the historical investigation and the deep relevance of the author’s theory. In an era of profound policy debates over AI governance and increased populist backlash to expert-based institutions like the WHO and UNFCCC, “A World from Nowhere” offers historically grounded insights relevant to both scholars and practitioners.
Jan Eijking is a William Golding Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, and a Fellow with the Oxford Martin Programme on Changing Global Orders. His research focuses on the role of experts in the history of international organizations and international thought. His first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, is now under contract with Oxford University Press.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Marybeth Ulrich (Chair) of the United States Naval War College, Dr. Jonas Tallberg of Stockholm University, and Dr. Adam Lerner of the University of Massachusetts Lowell.