Each year, the Levine Prize is awarded under the auspices of the Research Committee on the Structure and Organization of Government (RC 27) of the International Political Science Association.
The prize honors the legacy of Charles H. Levine, a distinguished member of the committee and a former member of the editorial board of its official journal, Governance. The prize recognizes the best book in the field of comparative public administration or public policy published in the preceding year, based on the recommendation of an independent and distinguished selection committee. This year’s committee was composed of Professors Akshay Mangla (Chair, University of Oxford, UK), Diego Salazar-Morales (Leiden University, Netherlands), and Michelle Fernandez (University of Brasília, Brazil).
This year, the Award Committee has selected The Politics of Refugee Policy in the Global South, by Ola G. El-Taliawi, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, as the 2025 recipient of the Levine Award.
An excerpt from the committee’s award citation:
The Politics of Refugee Policy in the Global South confronts a central paradox in global refugee governance: countries of the Global South—that share trajectories of limited economic development, colonial legacies, and postcolonial state-building—host 83% of the world’s refugees. While these states grapple with constrained state capacities, limited economic resources, and marginal influence in international politics, scholarly and political debates remain overwhelmingly fixated on the Global North, rendering the experiences and governance innovations of the South markedly understudied. This book addresses this longstanding empirical gap by offering an innovative theoretical and methodological framework for analysing how Global South states respond to mass refugee movements.
Theoretically, the book draws on complex systems theory to develop a heuristic model that traces how specific inputs (international law, humanitarian assistance, and the role of international organizations) interact with weak or uneven institutional infrastructures of Global South states to produce distinct governance outputs. These outputs include how refugee entry and stay are regulated, how livelihoods are structured, and how durable solutions are envisioned and pursued. This framework is both innovative and generalisable, offering scholars and policymakers valuable tools for analysing refugee governance in other Global South contexts experiencing large-scale displacement, often from neighbouring countries.
To learn more about the book visit Book Launch: The Politics of Refugee Policy in the Global South Webinar Event Report – LERRN: The Local Engagement Refugee Research Network