Merton International Relations student wins 2014 Malone Thesis Prize
Merton DPhil student Arthur Learoyd has been awarded the Deirdre and Paul Malone Thesis Prize in International Relations, worth £2,000. Arthur is beginning his sixth year as a student at Merton, where he completed his undergraduate degree in History and Politics between 2009 and 2012, and his MPhil in International Relations from 2012 to 2014.
Arthur's thesis was an examination of the concept of 'semi-sovereignty' in the law of nations, which showed how legal theorists from the late-17th to early-20th centuries offered different arguments for the nature and source of state sovereignty, and how these opened up and closed off different possibilities for thinking of sovereignty as impaired or partial. These theoretical developments were placed in the context of developments in the structure of international society, and he highlighted how lawyers thought about a set of 'semi-sovereign' states (such as protectorates and neutralized states) in order to make sense of their changing conceptual frameworks. Arthur is currently expanding this into a DPhil thesis, which aims to supplement this doctrinal account with a comparative-historical analysis of relationships of semi-sovereignty in practice.
Arthur explained:
"In many ways a mixture of historical and social-scientific approaches has been a constant of my academic career so far, most obviously in the range of subjects I studied as an undergraduate, but also in the way my doctoral research combines the history of ideas and historical case studies with international relations theory."
He added:
"I am incredibly grateful to have received this prize. I am sure it will prove very helpful over the coming years, and has already provided some much-appreciated encouragement in the daunting early stages of putting together a DPhil research project."
Dr David Malone, whose benefaction made the prize possible, received his doctorate in International Relations from Oxford in 1997 and was until recently the President of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa, Ontario. He is now the Rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo.
