Honourable Mention in Tuchman Award for Naosuke Mukoyama

DPhil candidate Naosuke Mukoyama has received an honourable mention for the Barbara W. Tuchman Award, given to the best graduate student paper on Historical International Relations by the International Studies Association.

Mukoyama, a DPhil student in International Relations, was acknowledged for his paper ‘Painting states in oil: The separate independence of Qatar, Bahrain and beyond’. In it, he examines the historical relationship between oil and sovereignty. Mainly using the cases of Qatar and Bahrain, he shows that the conjunction of oil production and a specific type of colonial administration system led to the creation of states that would otherwise not exist.

The prestigious Tuchman Award is named after Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989), a popular historian whose expertise ranged from Bronze Age Palestine to World War II. She received the Pulitzer Prize for her book The Guns of August about the diplomatic machinations in the lead up to World War I.