Robin Harding wins prestigious American Political Science Association award for Best Article Published in the Journal of Theoretical Politics.
Associate Professor of Government Robin Harding has won the Elinor Ostrom Award from the Formal Theory Section of the American Political Science Association.
The prize for Best Article Published in the Journal of Theoretical Politics, was awarded to Robin and his co-authors Avidit Acharya (Stanford), and Andrew Harris (New York University), for their paper ‘Security in the absence of a state: Traditional authority, livestock trading, and maritime piracy in northern Somalia’.
The paper explores how, in the absence of strong state institutions, groups with conflicting economic interests can find ways to cooperate more peacefully.
The model they develop accounts for different relationships between piracy, livestock exports, and conflict in the northern Somali regions of Puntland and Somaliland.
They conclude that piracy is best controlled by expansion of alternative economic activity, such as livestock trading, and improving the social and political institutions that promote income-sharing in society.
Robin said: “I’m delighted that our paper has been recognized in this way. The initial ideas for the research were first conceived while I was a PPRF at Nuffield almost ten years ago, and the finished article was the product of a huge amount of collaborative effort since then.
“We are particularly proud of how the paper suggests new ways of integrating theory with case analysis that could be especially valuable in contexts where data are limited.”
The award will be announced at the Formal Theory section’s business meeting online and presented at APSA’s reception in Montreal at a later date.
