2025 ESIL Monograph Prize

The deadline for the receipt of books that are submitted for consideration for the 2025 Monograph Prize is 15 February 2025.

Please find the ESIL Monograph Prize Guidelines here.

If you would like to know more about the ESIL Collaborative Book Prize, please read here.

Freya Baetens and Federica Paddeu are the ESIL Board members coordinating the Prize; please contact them with any questions.

The 2024 ESIL Monograph Prize was awarded in September 2024 during the 19th ESIL Annual Conference in Vilnius to Arianna Whelan for her book Reciprocity in Public International Law (CUP, 2023).

Jury’s decision:

The book covers a very important concept for international law in a comprehensive and elegant manner. While issues concerning reciprocity have been addressed in other works, the scope and depth of this book adds important academic and practical value to international law scholarship. The author writes with a clear and engaging style, supporting her arguments in a wealth of relevant legal sources. She provides a detailed legal analysis of the various roles and articulations of reciprocity in several key fields of public international law, including the law of treaties, the treatment of individuals, the enforcement of international law, and the jurisdiction of international courts and tribunals and human rights courts and treaty bodies. Notably, the author points out that reciprocity is not the enemy of community interests and obligations, quite the contrary, while at the same time supporting and operationalizing the principle of the sovereign equality of States.

Previous Book Prize winners: 

• ESIL Monograph Prize 2023: Frederick Cowell (Birkbeck, University of London) for Defensive Relativism The Use of Cultural Relativism in International Legal Practice, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.
• ESIL Monograph Prize 2022: Anne Orford (University of Melbourne) for International Law and the Politics of History, CUP, 2021.
• ESIL Book Prize 2021: François Delerue (University of Leiden) for Cyber Operations and International Law, CUP, 2020.
• ESIL Book Prize 2020: Daniel Peat (University of Leiden) for Comparative Reasoning in International Courts and Tribunals, CUP, 2019.
• ESIL Book Prize 2019: John Linarelli, Margot E. Salomon and Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah for The Misery of International Law: Confrontations with Injustice in the Global Economy, OUP, 2018, and Alejandro Rodiles for Coalitions of the Willing and International Law: The Interplay between Formality and Informality, CUP, 2018.
• ESIL Book Prize 2018: Dr. Guy Fiti Sinclair (Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law) for his book To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States, OUP, 2017.
• ESIL Book Prize 2017: Prof. James A. Green (Professor of Public International Law at the University of Reading) for his book The Persistent Objector Rule in International Law, OUP, 2016
• ESIL Book Prize 2016: Dr Arnulf Becker Lorca (Visiting  Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki) Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842-1933, CUP, 2015
• ESIL Book Prize 2015:  Monica Garcia-Salmones Rovira (Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki) The Project of Positivism in International Law, OUP, 2014
• ESIL Book Prize 2014: Sandesh Sivakumaran (University of Nottingham), The Law of Non-International Armed Conflict, Oxford University Press 2012; Ingo Venzke (University of Amsterdam), How Interpretation Makes International Law. On Semantic Change and Normative Twists, OUP, 2012
• ESIL Book Prize 2012: Michael Waibel (Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge), Sovereign Defaults before International Courts and Tribunals, CUP, 2011
• ESIL Book Prize 2010: Lorenzo Gradoni (University of Bologna), Regime Failure nel diritto internazionale, CEDAM, 2009
• ESIL Book Prize 2008: Matthew Craven (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), The Decolonization of International Law: State Succession and the Law of Treaties, OUP, 2007