Associate Professor Murad Idris received the 2020 David Easton Award and the 2020 Best Paper Award, Foundations of Political Theory Section, from the American Political Science Association (APSA). Professor Idris was awarded the David Easton Award for his book, War for Peace. It explores how the moral ideal of "peace" facilitates aggression, violence, and hierarchy across the writings of 10 key thinkers, from Plato to Kant and Qutb. The David Easton Award is awarded to "a book that broadens the horizons of contemporary political science by engaging issues of philosophical significance in political life through any of a variety of approaches in the social sciences and humanities." This is the first time that a first book has won this prestigious award. The Best Paper Award is awarded to "the best paper presented on a foundations panel at the previous year’s APSA Annual Meeting." Professor Idris won the Best Paper Award for his work in the Rawls Papers, which was recently published as "The Kazanistan Papers: Reading the Muslim Question in the John Rawls Archives." This article is the first examination of Islam in the personal papers of the American philosopher John Rawls. It studies how Rawls invented a hypothetical Muslim state that he called "Kazanistan" and what it reflects about his attention to geopolitics.

Congratulations to Professor Idris for these remarkable accomplishments!