The University of Arizona Press
March 7, 2025
The International Studies Association, International Political Economy Section gave Manuela Lavinas Picq the 2024 Outstanding Activist Scholar Award. She is co-author with Andrew Canessa of Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State.
To celebrate the award, Picq recently participated in a roundtable, “When Our Bodies Stand for Our Ideas” at the Plenary Session of Development Days Conference 2025 in Helsinki, Finland. Other roundtable participants were previous award-winner Teivo Teivanen, Barry Gills, who co-founded the award, and Bonn Juego, who is Director of the Finnish Society for Development.
Congratulations, Manuela!
About the book:
Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, the Savages and Citizens shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.
