ESIL Monograph Prize

2026 ESIL Monograph Prize Submission

The ESIL Monograph Prize is awarded each year at the ESIL Annual Conference along with with the ESIL Collaborative Book Prize.

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

Practical information on the ESIL Monograph Prize and on how to submit your nomination is available below:

  • ESIL Monograph Prize Guidelines
  • Deadline for the receipt of 2026 ESIL Monograph Prize books is 15 February 2026.
  • The European University Institute is closed between 15 December 2025 and 7 January 2026 so please avoid sending books during this period.

2025 ESIL Monograph Prize Winner

The 2025 ESIL Monograph Prize was awarded in September 2025 during the 20th ESIL Annual Conference in Berlin to Emmanuelle Tourme-Jouannet (Sciences Po Paris)  for her book Un nouveau droit international écologique. Habiter autrement la Terre (Larcier-Intersentia, 2024).

Jury’s decision:

Emmanuelle Tourme Jouannet’s Un nouveau droit international écologique. Habiter autrement la terre presents an innovative rethinking of international law through an ecological lens, offering a fresh conceptual approach that integrates environmental ethics with legal norms. This challenges the traditionally anthropocentric orientation of international law and pushes for a more just, sustainable, and globally equitable legal order.

The book stands out for its interdisciplinary depth, drawing on law, philosophy, and political theory to construct a compelling normative vision that calls for transformative—not merely incremental—change. Despite the book’s highly theoretical nature, it offers concrete legal tools and pragmatic strategies for reform of global environmental governance. For instance, the book proposes how its suggested ecological legal order could be practically enforced or implemented within existing international institutional frameworks, in particular within the United Nations.

The book also offers a good balance of Western legal and philosophical traditions and of non-Western, indigenous, or Global South perspectives on ecological justice. This is a book that is timely when new ideas are needed on how to integrate planetary thinking in the future of international law-making to make the latter more robust for a healthy planet.

The book is written by one of the leading international lawyers known for critical thinking and innovative approaches to international law. Beyond the book, the awarding of the 2025 ESIL Book Award Prize is also a testimony to the great scholarship of Prof. Jouannet in several fields of international law. There is no doubt that the book will inspire present and future generations of international lawyers who are reflecting on new legal paths to protect and preserve Mother Earth from the adverse effects of global environmental degradation. The Committee for the 2025 Award ESIL Prize has been unanimously admirative of the book of Prof. Jouannet and is convinced that it reflects originality as well as the values of ESIL.

Previous Book/Monograph Prize Winners

  • ESIL Monograph Prize 2024: Arianna Whelan for Reciprocity in Public International Law, CUP, 2023
  • 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