The University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Awards aspire to honor work that challenges ideas and engages new thinking. They are announced each December in five different categories. Winners then visit U of L in the spring to give a lecture.
LPM’s Bill Burton spoke with U of L professor and director of the Grawemeyer Award for improving world order, Charles Ziegler.
This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Bill Burton: Let's start with a thumbnail sketch of what the Grawemeyer Awards are.
Charles Ziegler: The Grawemeyer Awards, and there are five of them, were set up by Charlie Grawemeyer years ago, back in the 1980s, to reward great ideas, great accomplishments in five different fields. Music, world order, education, religion and psychology.
BB: You have a major role in selecting the person who wins the world order award. It's given to someone who's presented an idea that could lead to a more just and peaceful world. Can you take us through the process of naming a winner?
CZ: We start at the beginning of the calendar year, and we solicit nominations. Self nominations are not allowed, so it has to be through a publisher or a colleague. At that point, I start looking for peer reviewers, meaning people who are top experts in that particular field. I send that out to peer reviewers and give them about six weeks to review it. Once we collect those, around May, the Grawemeyer committee goes through all the peer reviews, looks at the works, and we sift those down to about six.
Then I choose what we call the distinguished international jury. Very top people at places like Cornell, UCLA, Stanford, including one person who's a policy person, say, a person who's been in the U.S. State Department and knows the reality on the ground. Then they have the summer to read these books. They meet in September and discuss those and they select the top three of those. After that, there is one more committee, the presidential selection committee, made up by top U of L administrators and three lay people who choose the final winner. That's usually in November. The lay people are there because Charlie Grawemeyer said he wants the book to be something intelligible to the educated layperson.
BB: The award this year was given to a professor at the University of Texas, Joshua Busby. What made him the winner this year?
CZ: This book meets all our criteria beautifully in that it deals with a very important issue, and that is climate change. It deals with the impact of climate change on violence. What Busby has done here is set up a fascinating comparative framework. He uses what are paired cases.
He'll look at pairs of two countries, and he does this in the Middle East and in South Asia and in Africa, and says, “Okay, if we have a couple of countries that face similar problems, but one did much better in solving their issues with climate change. What makes that particular case where they had better luck?”
He has a series of these paired cases, and his conclusion is that, number one, you have to have better state capacity. Weak states that can't manage their affairs very well are not going to handle disasters like this very well. Secondly, they need to be inclusive. If you have a state government that excludes a good chunk of the population, that's an ethnic minority or something like that, they're not going to do as well. And thirdly, they need to work well with and accept assistance from the international community.
