We are delighted to announce that the IO article War and Welfare in Colonial Algeria by Gabriel Koehler-Derrick and Melissa M. Lee won APSA’s French Politics group’s 2026 Stanley Hoffman award for best article in French Politics for the years 2023-2024.

The committee wrote:

“Historians of the welfare state have long told a story in which war is a great leveler. Mass mobilization begets citizenship, and citizenship begets social rights. Koehler-Derrick and Lee take that story to French Algeria and, commune by commune, watch it fail. Using newly digitized fiscal records and a name-based reconstruction of who actually died for France, they show that colonial subjects who bled in the same trenches as French settlers came home to communes that spent no more, often less, on the relief that mobilization was supposed to buy. It is bellicist theory audited at the level of the ledger book using a design equal to the difficulty of its own data. The committee chose this article because it exposes a blind spot in a major theory of the state by asking, plainly and inconveniently, for whom.”

This article is published open access.