The Winner of the Polly Corrigan Book Prize 2024
The Polly Corrigan Book Prize committee is delighted to announce that the winner of the Prize for 2024 is:
Sophie Duroy, The Regulation of Intelligence Activities under International Law (Elgar Publishing, 2023).
Regulation of Intelligence Activities represents a considerable achievement. In it, Sophie Duroy deftly undertakes a forensic examination of contemporary intelligence practices through the lenses of human rights, international law, and national security.
Sophie Duroy, The Regulation of Intelligence Activities under International Law (Elgar Publishing, 2023).
Since the events of September 11, 2001, and a subsequent ‘global war on terror’, scholars have wrestled with a ‘liberty–security conundrum’ that positions security and liberty as competing interests. The protection of security, it has been suggested, occasionally necessitates uncomfortable compromises in the rule of law and with human rights. Sophie Duroy’s pathbreaking and meticulously researched work confronts this binary and underscores the consequences that result from intelligence operations that safeguard national security at the expense of international law and universal human rights.
In the aftermath of 9/11, some states were tempted to implement narrow and short-term approaches to national security that marginalised root causes and amplified coercion and repression. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, Sophie Duroy demonstrates that assumptions surrounding the relative costs and benefits of intelligence practices that came into tension with international law need to be reconsidered. Noncompliance with international legal norms, the Regulation of Intelligence Activities posits, is incompatible with effective intelligence, corrodes global security, and acts against the long-term national interests of the states involved. Only by rejecting seemingly quick and questionable national security fixes, this book maintains, can states improve national security outcomes and, at the same time, ensure compliance with international legal obligations.
Looking to the future, Sophie Duroy notes that controversies associated with intelligence practice in the post-9/11 era have led international courts to seek accountability for breaches of international law and to develop new regulatory models for intelligence activity. While limited, this significant development is framed as a positive move towards increasing legal compliance and enhancing global security.
Based on exemplary research, rich in evidence and argument, and addressing an intelligence issue of enduring importance, this book challenges our understanding of how best to respond to evolving national security threats and remain on the right side of the law.
he 2024 Polly Corrigan Book Prize Committee awarded an honourable mention to two entries submitted posthumously by MIT Press and Georgetown University Press on behalf of the late Professor Kristie Macrakis.
Kristie's books, Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach: America's Techno-Spy Empire (Georgetown University Press, 2023) and Espionage: A Concise History (The MIT Press, 2023), were celebrated by the prize committee as characteristic of her engaging, informative, and erudite style of scholarship and as fitting testimony to the considerable and consequential contribution made by Professor Macrakis to the field of intelligence studies over many decades.
Dr Polly Corrigan is a former journalist and teaching assistant at King’s College London, whose research focused on the Great Terror in the 1930s Soviet Union.