2019 Book Award

The North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP) has reviewed the books nominated for its annual prize for best book in social philosophy. The Book Award Committee is delighted to recognize Yvonne Chiu’s Conspiring with the Enemy: The Ethic of Cooperation in Warfare (Columbia University Press) as its winner of the 2019 Book Award. Dr. Chiu constructs the book around a highly original thesis in just war theory: that ethics and norms of cooperation have operated with combatants in warfare, even as they are engaged in war. The argument has deep historical roots, and demonstrates some of the paradoxes and tensions that emerge from modern attempts to impose humane restrictions on warfare, such as the Geneva Conventions. The committee admired the vast historical research, rigorous argumentation, and most of all, the clarity with which Chiu’s elegant prose always reminds us of the humanity of combatants. While the book is rigorously analytical, it does not reduce war to an impersonal chess game. We expect the book to be a significant contributor to just war theory. The Committee will sponsor a symposium with Dr. Chiu about her book at NASSP’s annual conference (July 16 – 18, venue Neumann University or Zoom).

 

There were many nominations for the prize this year, and the Committee also wants to congratulate the other finalists for this year’s prize:

 

Jill Delston, Medical Sexism: Contraception Access, Reproductive Medicine, and Health Care (Lexington)

 

Jonathan Marks, The Perils of Partnership: Industry Influence, Institutional Integrity, and Public Health (Oxford)

 

Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

 

Alasia Nuti, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress (Cambridge)