The International Relations Department is very pleased to announce the MSc prizewinners for the 2023/24 session:
for the best 10,000 word MSc IR Dissertation
This was awarded to:
Grace Lundell
for the dissertation entitled
NATO’s Functional Evolution: Understanding Public Opinion of NATO’s Post-Cold War Tasks
for the best 10,000 word MSc IPE Dissertation
This was awarded to
Nemo Krüger
for the dissertation entitled
Compliance as a bargaining chip: The Weaponisation of the Eastern Telegraph Companies in the South African War 1899-1902
for the best 10,000 word MSc IR(R) Dissertation
This was awarded to
Johannes Feldt
for the dissertation entitled
Imperial domination and resistance: the establishment of a large-scale plantation economy on St. Croix, Danish West Indies, 1733-1803
This was awarded to
Anna Grech
for the best performance in IR4A1 Core Theories and Debates
This was awarded to
Frank Devincenzi
for the best performance in IR4A2 International Relations: Global Applications
This was awarded to
Anna Grech
for the best performance in IR4A3 International Relations: Critical Perspectives
See below for summaries of the above dissertations:
MSc International Relations Philip Windsor Dissertation Prize
Grace Lundell
NATO’s Functional Evolution: Understanding Public Opinion of NATO’s Post-Cold War Tasks
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) enduring Cold War purpose was Western collective defense against the USSR (Østerud and Toje 2013, 73-78; Yost 2010, 490). The Cold War’s end thus fundamentally questioned NATO’s ‘raison d’être’ (Østerud and Toje 2013, 77). However, rather than dissolve, NATO functions expanded throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Øyvind Østerud and Asle Toje assert NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept affirmed a new ‘tripartite function’ for the organisation: collective defense, crisis management, and cooperative security (Østerud and Toje 2013, 78).
A plethora of scholarship exists on Member State’s government-level outlooks on NATO’s functional evolution, with frequent recourse to Realist ideas of threat and Strategic Culture-based concepts of Atlanticism and force-use tendencies to explain Member State divergences. However, scholarship on how Member State citizens view NATO’s functional expansion remains scarce, even as these citizens are increasingly vocal regarding their state’s security activities and involvement in international organisations (Gronau and Schmidtke 2016, 546). This dissertation thus interrogates how public opinion of NATO actions varies between its traditional collective defense initiatives and its expanded post-Cold War functions.
Of course, Russia’s Ukraine war re-emphasized NATO’s collective defense focus. However, NATO’s expanded tasks have not disappeared. NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, released post-Russia’s Ukraine invasion, re-states NATO’s three foci (NATO 2022a, 6-10). The 2024 Washington Summit reaffirmed NATO’s tripartite function (NATO 2024). Furthermore, while Russia is currently NATO’s primary concern, NATO continues to adopt the global security focus that crisis management and cooperative security functions reflect and address (NATO 2024). NATO remains an evolved, multi-function organization. My study of public opinion of these functions promotes vital understanding of how citizens view NATO and paths NATO can pursue to bolster support.
MSc International Political Economy Susan Strange Dissertation Prize
Nemo Krüger
Compliance as a bargaining chip: The Weaponisation of the Eastern Telegraph Companies in the South African War 1899-1902
Corporate power is a recurring theme in discussions about the global economy. Yet, the autonomy of firms remains largely absent when we think about their involvement in economic statecraft. Taking the example of the Eastern Telegraph Companies, it will be shown how the British Empire used the firm’s control over the global submarine cable network to both surveil and shut down the communications of the Boer republics in the South African War from 1899 to 1902. The compliance of Eastern should, however, not be taken for granted. Rather, the firm’s monopoly bestowed it with outsized autonomy and political power. The reason why it obeyed nevertheless was that Imperial governments threatened the company’s market position by allowing for increased foreign competition and by building a state-run alternative cable. This paper argues that Eastern used its compliance in war as a bargaining chip to stave off this imminent threat. By paying attention to issue-linkages in government-firm negotiations, it is thus shown how states can invoke anti-trust measures to discipline private power and leverage its infrastructures as tools for economic statecraft.
MSc International Relations Research Martin Wight Dissertation Prize
Johannes Feldt
Imperial domination and resistance: the establishment of a large-scale plantation economy on St. Croix, Danish West Indies, 1733-1803
This thesis interrogates imperial domination and its resistance in relation to the establishment of a large-scale plantation economy on the Caribbean island of St. Croix in the early period of its Danish colonisation (1733-1803). Recent scholarly contributions to the study of imperialism in Historical International Relations (HIR) have emphasised the need for relational approaches to empire. While such approaches are highly valuable because they allow for the study of both past and present imperial formations, the study of imperialism in HIR remains largely anthropocentric. This thesis advances a relational conceptual framework to the study of imperial domination and its resistance based on Actor-Network Theory, that takes into account the role of more-than-human entities. Through archival research, this new framework is put to work in a detailed study of the first seventy years of plantation imperialism on St. Croix, thus shedding light on the Danish imperial polity in the Caribbean, which has received only very little attention in IR. The stories told of imperial domination and resistance within the thesis involve complex networks of human and more-than-human actors: ships, colonial administration, racism, violence, disease, hurricanes, poisoned stakes, terrain, weaponry, sugar cane, enslaved bodies, and even magic emerge as sources of agency and change. Non-anthropocentric accounts of imperialism and its resistance, such as the one presented in the thesis are important, if IR is to confront the many extractivist, exploitative, and racist socioecological crises of our time, which some have called the Plantationocene.
