Max Gallien Named the Recipient of the 2025 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award

We are delighted to announce that Max Gallien has been named as the recipient of the 2025 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award for his first book titled Smugglers and States: Negotiating the Maghreb at Its Margins, published by Columbia University Press in 2024. Max Gallien is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex and a Research Lead at the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD).

Citation from the Award Committee
The committee selected Professor Max Gallien’s book, Smugglers and States: Negotiating the Maghreb at Its Margins. The book reveals how governments tacitly permit illicit cross-border trade and devise informal arrangements to regulate it. Gallien examines the peripheral regions of Morocco and Tunisia where State presence is weak. As the driving force of the cross-border economy, smuggling acts as a job creator and social regulator. Gallien’s theory on smuggling adaptation reveals how groups reorganize to maintain their position in the local economy.

With rich empirical detail, this study innovates in the regulation of cross-border crime in addition to initiating an original reflection on the withdrawal, substitution or maintenance of the State. Smugglers and States provides insights in regions where economic inclusion of many livelihoods exist outside the law. The book represents an important contribution to cross-border studies in the context of greater control, political pressure, and securitization.

Max Gallien is a political scientist specializing in the political economy of development, with a focus on informal economies, taxation, and smuggling. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex and a Research Lead at the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD), where he co-leads the research program on informality and taxation. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and an MPhil from the University of Oxford. He is the author of Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins (Columbia University Press, 2024) and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Smuggling (Routledge, 2022). He lives in London. 

About the Award
The APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award was established to honor Lowi’s distinctive contributions to the study of politics. Throughout a prolific and influential career, Lowi developed new understandings of the relationship of public policy to politics, the influence of institutional arrangements on the exercise of power, the role of ideology in the development of political parties, the relationship of democracy to law, the relevance of concept analysis for theory building, and more.