Double Recognition for SSE academics at the BISA awards 2026
The British International Studies Association (BISA) awards recognise excellence and achievement through research and teaching in the field of International Studies, and are announced at BISA's annual conference.
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Congratulations to SSE's Niharika Pandit, Lecturer in Sociology, for winning the British International Studies Association (BISA) 2026 prize for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Prize.
Congratulations also to Innocent Batsani-Ncube, Senior Lecturer in African Politics, who received BISA's honourable mention for his recently published book 'China and African Parliaments', after being shortlisted for the BISA 2026 L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize.
The BISA awards panel was particularly impressed Niharika's range of community building initiatives and in her role as BISA Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) working group convenor.
"Niharika Pandit’s work reflects the profile of an early career scholar who has already made significant contributions to the field of EDI in international studies, within and beyond BISA and academia."
"Additional efforts she has engaged in include co-launching the Pluriversal Feminisms and Multispecies Justice: Thinking with/from the Global South, an experimental community-building initiative."
"Public engagement is also reflected in her work with Tower Hamlets Women’s Network, a group of over 170 ethnically diverse women, more than 75% of whom are from global majority background. Her EDI commitments are also evident in her award-winning research which informs her book with Oxford University Press ‘Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir’.”
BISA said of Ib's submission: "Innocent Batsani-Ncube's manuscript is a fascinating and highly original book that investigates a genuinely underexplored area of China-Africa relations, namely the financing, design, construction, and maintenance of parliament buildings across three Southern African countries with Westminster-style parliaments."
"The topic is timely and touches on a number of broader issues, and the author follows the politics all the way through, from backroom negotiations over design, to the exclusion of local architects, to the question of who holds the maintenance contract decades later, and weaving together a story that is as compelling as it is novel."
"Finally, the author's positionality also deserves to be celebrated. Batsani-Ncube is a scholar from rural Zimbabwe writing authoritatively about how China is reshaping African political institutions. That vantage point is epistemically significant, not merely biographical, and speaks directly to what LHM Ling argued throughout her career."
Find out more about China and African Parliaments