ISRF Mid-Career Fellowship Competition
In December 2025, the ISRF launched its eighth Mid-Career Fellowship competition. Having received a number of strong proposals, the Selection Panel met in July 2026, and voted to make seven awards:
Dr Rune Bennike (University of Southern Denmark)
Energy Transition in the Seesaw: Labor Regimes, Semi-Peripheral Development, and Moral Economies Between Deindustrialization and Decarbonization
This project reframes discussions of a just energy transition. Analysing connections between deindustrialization and decarbonization in Europe’s shift towards renewable energy, it advances a critical, empirically grounded theorization of transitional labour regimes, semi-peripheral development, and moral economies. To do so, the project brings together extensive ethnographic and archival material collected in the Sulcis region of Sardinia over the past three years. Some of this material provides the basis for pipeline articles, yet only its combination in a book-length publication allows the necessary scope to ground the theoretical ambition and shape an agenda-setting contribution to the field.
Professor Lara M. Coleman (University of Sussex, UK)
Insurgent Humanism
In response to climate breakdown, international complicity in genocide, and revival of Monroe Doctrine US imperialism, movements from across Latin America, southern Africa and the Levant have converged around profoundly humanistic principles. Against the current of much contemporary critical theory, this grassroots internationalism echoes the militant Third-Worldism of the twentieth century in its persistent appeals to ‘humanity’, and humanistic interpretations of international law. It is, however, also embedded within struggles of workers, indigenous peoples, and dispossessed communities that are themselves sites of rich critical thought - and sometimes explicit commitments to rethinking ‘the human’ in opposition to ideas of humanity at the heart of law and development discourse.
More Info: https://isrf.org/projects/insurgent-humanism
Dr Mariagiulia Giuffré (Independent Scholar) & Professor Triestino Mariniello (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)
Genocide Obligations from Below: Civil Society and the Operationalisation of Prevention and Cooperation Duties
What happens when States fail to discharge their primary duties to prevent genocide and cooperate to end it? In answering this question, this project develops a novel legal theory of genocide obligations mobilised “from below” through the work of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). While international law formally assigns these responsibilities to States, the project argues that CSOs increasingly play a decisive role in triggering, shaping, and operationalising them in practice, especially where state-led enforcement mechanisms falter.
Dr Stella Milani (University of Florence, Italy)
Beyond the Script: Decentring the Vulnerability Paradigm Through Comics-Based Participatory Research with Unaccompanied Migrant Minors in Italy
In contemporary asylum governance, ‘vulnerability’ operates as an administrative idiom of protection and a classificatory technology: it sorts cases, organises priorities, and authorises differential treatment by determining what counts as a recognisable need. While critical scholarship has mapped the institutional architectures through which vulnerability is produced and operationalised, we still lack fine-grained accounts of how such classifications are negotiated, resisted, and reworked by those at the margins of epistemic authority—whose accounts are routinely met with scepticism and whose public voice is structurally constrained.
Dr Lisa Palmer (University of Birmingham, UK)
Love Inside Babylon - The Cultural Politics of Lovers Rock Reggae Music in Britain
This research critically examines lovers rock, the distinctly Black British Caribbean genre of romantic reggae that emerged in London’s mid-1970s sound system and pirate radio scene. Palmer argues that this music—often dismissed as a sentimental, apolitical counterpoint to the overt protests of roots reggae—was in fact a vital site where the cultural politics of Rastafari, love-politics, blackness, gender, sexuality, and the erotic converged. Against a backdrop of economic decline, far-right ascendency, and urban uprisings from St Pauls to Brixton, lovers rock articulated a politics of Black diasporic revolution dreaming, permitted erotic intimacies and an anti-colonial collective consciousness that demands scholarly attention.
Professor Anna Stavrianakis (University of Sussex, UK)
Unfinished Business. Weapons, War And Empire In The 21st Century
The world stands at what UN Secretary-General António Guterres calls a “pivotal juncture.” In 2025, military spending reached a world-historic high, while only one in five of the UN Sustainable Development Goals will be reached by 2030. The arms trade is the crucial link connecting state spending, corporate weapons production, and the wars, violence, and inequality that follow, driving death, displacement and disease.
This book project offers a novel, creative and accessible account of the arms trade and its significance for global (dis)order.
More Info: https://isrf.org/projects/unfinished-business-weapons-war-and-empire-in-the-21st-century
Dr Deniz Yonucu Kesici (Newcastle University, UK)
Entangled Racisms: How Multiple Racisms Fuel the Far-Right in Diverse Societies
Why do some segments of migrant-background populations support political projects that are explicitly anti-migrant and racist? In Germany, nearly one in five citizens with migration backgrounds expresses support for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right party with a hardline anti-migrant stance.
Studies on the European far-right rightly foreground racism as a key structuring force. But they rely on largely Eurocentric genealogies and therefore struggle to account for why racialised actors sometimes participate in the circulation of racism. This project addresses this blind spot by developing entangled racisms as a new conceptual framework for understanding how multiple racisms interact in diverse societies to fuel the far-right.
Congratulations to all eight of our new ISRF Mid-Career Fellows, and - as ever - a huge thank you to the hundreds of reviewers who make an invaluable contribution to our assessment process.