2026 Alice Amsden Best Book Award Winner Announced
The 2026 Alice Amsden Book Award Committee is delighted to announce this year’s prize.
This was a highly competitive year: over 40 books were submitted, and the quality across submissions was remarkable. From this strong field, one book stood out for its innovation, originality, methodological rigor, and clear contribution to the field of socio-economics. The committee unanimously agreed to award the 2026 prize to:
Hannah Pool’s intense, rigorous book, The Game, illuminates a previously invisible socio-economic system. The central puzzle—how undocumented migrants with very limited resources are nevertheless able to move across borders and sustain long migration trajectories—is immediately compelling, and the book finds the answer in the moral and economic relationships that bind migrants to families, smugglers, fellow travelers, and states at every stage of the journey. The empirical material is also exceptionally strong. Pool follows migrants across multiple moments of their journeys, granting the ethnography unusual texture and range. She brings linguistic and cultural fluency to her subject, capturing not just the language but the connotations embedded in the world of “the game.” The book’s careful methodological reflexivity is also a strength, offering the reader clear insight into what can and cannot be known in clandestine migration worlds. The result is a highly credible and genuinely illuminating account, one that makes the reader fundamentally rethink how mobility operates under conditions of inequality and border restriction.
The committee also recognized four shortlisted titles for their exceptional contributions to the field:
Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights (Stanford University Press, 2025) by Katherine Eva Maich.