Bringing together events, practices, and discourses in the global cities of Rio and Cairo, from the landmark United Nations summits held in these cities (in 1992 and 1994, respectively) to the present, Amar interweaves fascinating empirical detail and provocative meta-reflection on the trajectories and paradoxes of militarism, humanitarianism, and sexuality politics in our global age.

Ever since his book The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976), Jim Scott has demonstrated how the meaning-making of the people in the settings one studies is central to political understanding and analysis. Drawing on years of field research in Southeast Asia, Scott brought fine-grained attention to ethnographic detail into conversation with high level theory to produce sophisticated and persuasive accounts of the centrality of contextualized meaning-making to the operation of power.

Human Rights in Camera does that critical theoretical work Sheldon Wolin referred to as “making the familiar unfamiliar.” Sliwinski shows us that human rights are not revealed by reason alone, but through an experience of seeing, “imagined and idealized on the wings of aesthetic experience.”

Anne Norton is an ideal honoree both for her scholarship and for the work she has done in the profession to expand the scope of what counts as knowing in political science. Her research record exemplifies her tireless efforts to change how political science is done and what types of political science are valued. Her 95 Theses on Politics, Culture & Method (Yale University Press, 2004) provides a stunning assault on political science orthodoxy and opens multiple possibilities for using interpretive and antifoundational approaches to understand power, politics, culture, and identity.

Bud Duvall. Brilliant, impressive, important scholar. He made a mid-career change from being a cutting-edge quantifier/modeler to (for lack of a better term) a post-positivist orientation. He has long, long, long struggled to make an important space for critical, non-positivist, qualitative work against considerable odds at Minnesota, where he created and sustained the "Minnesota School" of scholars – an invisible college of his students that includes Tarak Barkawi (Cambridge, UK), Michael Barnett (Minnesota), Roxanne Doty (Arizona State), Mark Laffey (LSE), Himadeep Muppidi, Jutta Weldes (Bristol, UK), and Alex Wendt (OSU).

We are honored that Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph have accepted the Grain of Sand award for 2010, the first one to be given. In the view of members of the award committee, they embody the attributes described above both personally and in terms of their work.