Dr Luis L. Schenoni awarded Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award

We are pleased to announce that Dr Luis L. Schenoni’s book, Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, has been awarded the Latin American Studies Association (LASA)’s Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award. 

The highly prestigious award is presented to writers of ‘outstanding’ books that examine Latin American policy and international affairs. Eligible works may be published in Spanish, Portuguese, or English.

Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2024), has been praised by scholars such as Sidney Tarrow, James Mahoney, Stathis Kalyvas and Nobel Prize Winner James Robinson, as an example of interdisciplinary, empirically driven and policy-relevant research in conflict and development. Besides the 2026 Luciano Tomassini Award, the book also received the 2026 Award for Best Book in Foreign Policy (ISA), the 2025 Hedley Bull Prize for the Best Book in International Relations (ECPR), an honourable mention for the 2025 Levine Prize for the Best Book in Public Administration (IPSA), and was shortlisted for the 2025 Luebbert Award for the Best Book in Comparative Politics (APSA). These distinctions testify to its broad impact across disciplines and research communities worldwide. 

The book provides a fresh theory connecting war and state formation that incorporates the contingency of warfare and the effects of war outcomes in the long run. The book demonstrates that international wars in nineteenth-century Latin America triggered state-building, that the outcomes of those wars affected the legitimacy and continuity of such efforts, and that the relative capacity of states in this region today continues to reflect those distant processes. Combining comparative historical analysis with cutting edge social science methods, the book provides a comprehensive picture of state formation in nineteenth-century Latin America that is compelling for readers across disciplines, breathes new life into bellicist approaches to state formation, and offers a novel framework to explain variation in state capacity across Latin America and the world.

Luis Schenoni is currently co-editing two special issues devoted to the topic of the book with the Journal of Latin American Studies and America Latina Hoy, in which more than thirty scholars across the social sciences and humanities engage with his arguments. This is being done in collaboration with faculty in the Institute of the Americas at UCL.

With more than 12,000 members, the Latin American Studies Association stands as the largest association of scholars in the humanities and social sciences in the world.