Asst. Prof. Sam Hirst of the Department of International Relations has received significant recognition for his monograph Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919–1939, published by Oxford University Press in 2024.
The book has been awarded the prestigious European International History Prize (formerly the George Louis Beer Prize) from the most significant historical organization in the US, the American Historical Association (AHA). Additionally, it received the Marshall Shulman Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which honors outstanding scholarship in international relations involving states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.
Drawing on extensive archival research conducted across multiple countries, Against the Liberal Order offers a novel interpretation of interwar international relations. Challenging the conventional view that Kemalist–Bolshevik cooperation was merely pragmatic, Hirst demonstrates that Ankara and Moscow shared an ideological convergence rooted in concerns about underdevelopment relative to the West. Together, the Soviet Union and Turkey gradually formulated a statist alternative to liberal internationalism.
The book highlights how, through initiatives such as Soviet engineers contributing to the construction of textile factories in Kayseri and Nazilli, the two revolutionary governments on Europe’s eastern periphery pioneered new forms of bilateral diplomacy and state-led economic exchange—models that would influence Cold War dynamics and beyond.