Dara Kay Cohen and Former International Security Program Fellows to be Honored at 2019 International Studies Association Annual Meeting

Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy Dara Kay Cohen, an International Security Program (ISP) Faculty Affiliate, and three former ISP Fellows, Ahsan I. Butt, Rachel Elizabeth Whitlark, and Ketian Zhang, will receive International Security Studies Section awards at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA) in Toronto, Canada, in March 2019.

Professor Cohen will receive the annual Emerging Scholar Award, which recognizes scholars under the age of forty-five, or within fifteen years of receiving their Ph.D., who are judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field of security studies through their body of publications. Her research and teaching interests span the field of international relations, including international security, civil war and the dynamics of violence, and gender and conflict. Her current project is focused on the intersection of political violence, public opinion, and gender in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 

Ahsan I. Butt, Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, will receive the annual Best Book Award for Secession and Security: Explaining State Strategy Against Separatists (Cornell University Press, 2017). This award recognizes the book on any aspect of security studies that excels in originality, significance, and rigor, published in the prior calendar year. He was an ISP predoctoral research fellow in 2011–2012 and returned to the Belfer Center as a Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow for 2014–2015.

Rachel Elizabeth Whitlark, Assistant Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, will receive the annual Best Security Article award for "Nuclear Beliefs: A Leader-Focused Theory of Counter-Proliferation," Security Studies 26:4 (2017), 545–574. This award recognizes an article on any aspect of security studies that excels in originality, significance, and rigor, published in an academic journal during the prior calendar year. She was a joint ISP/Project on Managing the Atom research fellow from 2013–2016.

Ketian Zhang, who received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018, will receive the Patricia Weitsman Award for Outstanding ISSS Graduate Paper for "Killing the Chicken to Scare the Monkey: Explaining Chinese Coercion in the South China Sea (1990–2015)," which she presented at ISA San Francisco in 2018. This award recognizes the best graduate student paper on any aspect of security studies. She was an ISP predoctoral research fellow in 2017–2018.

The honorees will formally receive their awards at a reception held during the upcoming ISA Annual Meeting.