Rawi Abdelal Receives Marshall Shulman Book Prize for 2002

The Marshall Shulman Book Prize is sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University for an outstanding monograph on the international behavior of the countries of the former communist bloc.

Award Citation
In National Purpose in the World Economy: Post-Soviet States in Comparative Perspective (Cornell University Press), Rawi Abdelal combines considerable theoretical sophistication with extraordinarily in-depth empirical grounding. Asking how states develop foreign economic policy in the aftermath of imperial domination, Abdelal builds a new approach distinct from the dominant realist and liberal paradigms within the field of International Political Economy. He argues that neither statist realism nor economic liberalism captures the importance of national identity, and he demonstrates the power of his nationalist approach by comparing the foreign economic policies developed by Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His rich case studies are based on extensive interviewing with the key actors. Finally, lest the readers believe the argument is relevant only to the experience of post-Soviet states, Abdelal concludes with additional evidence from the experience of post-Habsburg Eastern Europe, 1950s Indonesia, and 1960s French West Africa. In this outstanding book, Abdelal makes a major contribution to the fields of post-Soviet studies and international political economy.