Egor Lazarev wins two APSA Awards

September 27, 2018

Congratulations to one of our newest faculty members, Egor Lazarev, who was recently selected for two APSA (American Political Science Association) Awards:

• The 2018 Women and Politics Research Section Best Paper Award for “Laws in Conflict: Legacies of War, Gender, and Legal Pluralism in Chechnya.” The purpose of this section is to foster the study of women and politics within the discipline of political science. The selection committee commented: “The paper explores citizens’ choices in a context of competing legal orders, drawing on an impressive range of original data sources from Chechnya – semistructured interviews, population surveys, and court cases. Lazarev finds that women are more likely to rely on state law while men tend to opt for Sharia and customary law, with this gap being the widest in areas of Chechnya most affected by civil conflict. He theorizes, in turn, that conflict empowered women to pursue their interests through state law, which presumes gender equality, versus non-state legal orders, which are explicitly discriminatory against women. His qualitative data suggests, further, that women’s choices have generated backlash from the Chechen government, which has sought to promote customary and Sharia law in an effort to reinstate the patriarchal order. On this basis, Lazarev concludes that gender is emerging as a key cleavage in state-building processes in post-conflict Chechnya. The committee found this paper to be theoretically exciting, empirically rich, and technically impressive, making a clear and novel contribution to women and politics research.”
• The 2018 Comparative Democratization Best Field Work Award. This prize rewards dissertation students who conduct especially innovative and difficult fieldwork.