The APSA Distinguished Award of Civic and Community Engagement is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor significant civic or community engagement activity by a political scientist which merges knowledge and practice and has an impact outside of the profession or the academy.
Mona Lena Krook is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Women & Politics Ph.D. Program at Rutgers University. She has published widely on gender and political representation, particularly on electoral gender quotas and the impact of women in public office, including the APSA award-winning Quotas for Women in Politics: Gender and Candidate Selection Reform Worldwide (Oxford University Press, 2009). Since 2015, she has worked closely with colleagues at the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and other global practitioners to recognize and combat violence against women in politics as a distinct form of violence aimed at preventing and undermining women’s political participation. In 2016, Krook collaborated with NDI to develop and launch the #NotTheCost campaign to stop violence against women in politics, which over the last five years has informed NDI’s global programming, contributed to debates at the United Nations, and inspired efforts in the U.S. Congress to address this problem. This work motivated and informed her most recent book, Violence against Women in Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020), which was researched and written with the support of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. Written for both scholars and practitioners, the book seeks to bring greater theoretical, empirical, and methodological rigor to the concept to advance democracy, human rights, and gender equality worldwide. Krook also created two companion resources, a Twitter account (@vawpolitics) and a website (https://www.vawpolitics.org/), to capture ongoing developments in theory and practice to ensure women’s equal rights to participate – freely and safely – in political life around the world.
Citation from the Award Committee:
We are tremendously pleased to award the 2021 APSA Distinguished Award for Civic and Community Engagement to Mona Lena Krook of Rutgers University. Her work reflects an important shift within the political science discipline, where scholars increasingly examine the role and impact of women on the institutions that comprise our social, political, economic, and cultural environment. Dr. Krook’s work provides a framework for understanding how violence against women affects the institutions that we interact with on a daily basis. Her work shows that good and useful outcomes can arise when there is a deeper connection between theoreticians and policymakers. Krook has carried out and prioritized this translational work with practitioners– partnering on outreach and legislation, organizing expert groups on violence against women, participating in practitioner-scholar workshops, presenting to political leaders and organizations, building toolkits for on-the-ground practitioners — to give her work power in the public sphere and for women’s lives. The broad reach and depth of her work has informed discussions within the United Nations and the U.S. Congress. Dr. Krook’s work has set the stage for states around the world to think more critically about the role and treatment of women in their society, with the ultimate goal of ensuring their safety and inclusion as full citizens of their respective countries.
