Fiona Feiang Shen-Bayh Named the Recipient of the 2023 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award

The 2023 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award has been awarded to Fiona Feiang Shen-Bayh for her first book, entitled Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Prof. Shen-Bayh is an Assistant Professor of political science at the College of William & Mary. She also serves as a faculty affiliate of the Global Research Institute and the Data Science program. Her research interests include authoritarian regimes, specifically legal and judicial instruments of power, and the challenges of promoting access to equitable justice.

Citation from the Award Committee: 

The IPSA Committee on Organization, Procedures and Awards (COPA) unanimously selected Professor Shen-Bayh’s book, entitled Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts, for the 2023 Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award. This important book on autocratic courts in sub-Saharan Africa during the post-independence era looks at how and why autocrats choose to punish opponents through the judicial process, and the circumstances under which they resort to extrajudicial means. Shen-Bayh’s presents a theory of judicial repression centered around the political trial. She argues that autocrats use courts to consolidate power, stifle dissent, repress political opponents, institutionalize punishment, and undermine the rule of law. Autocrats pack the court with regime loyalists to ensure their cooperation.

The book’s key insight, as it relates to autocratic systems, is that putting opponents on trial serves to demonstrate the regime’s power and the fruitlessness of opposition. Opponents, when put on trial, will always lose their case, and sometimes their lives. Shen-Bayh brings a wealth of original qualitative and quantitative data from archival sources to bear on her question and provides illuminating case studies. Her cases are well-researched, and her theory is general enough to be applied to different world regions and periods. Her work constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the role of courts in African politics, authoritarian regimes, and political control. 

About the Award

The APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award recognizes the author of a first book in any field of political science that exemplifies qualities of broad ambition, high originality, and intellectual daring, showing promise of having a substantive impact on the overall discipline, regardless of method, the specific focus of inquiry or approach to the subject. The Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award has been established to honour Prof. Lowi’s distinctive contributions to the study of politics. Throughout a prolific and influential career, Prof. Lowi developed new understandings of the relationship of public policy to politics, the influence of institutional arrangements to the exercise of power, the role of ideology in the development of political parties, the relationship of democracy to law, and the relevance of concept analysis for theory building.