Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s "This Time is Different" Wins CFR’s 2011 Arthur Ross Book Award

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press) by Carmen M. Reinhart of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Kenneth S. Rogoff of Harvard University has won CFR’s tenth annual Arthur Ross Book Award for the best book published on international affairs. Reinhart and Rogoff received $15,000 and were honored at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday.

"Based on deep historical study, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have constructed the definitive analysis of what causes financial crises, why they reoccur and how they trigger ongoing financial and economic downturns. This landmark analysis, completed just before the 2008 recession, offers some remedies but also a warning: Be skeptical of those who claim that recurring crises can be avoided and therefore ‘this time is different,’" said CFR Counselor James F. Hoge Jr., who chaired the selection committee.

The silver medal and a prize of $7,500 have been awarded to the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment’s Thomas Hegghammer for Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 (Cambridge University Press).

The jury also awarded an honorable mention and $2,500 to CFR Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow Charles A. Kupchan for How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace (Princeton University Press).

Additional shortlist nominees included Columbia University’s Robert Jervis for Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Cornell University Press), and  Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic for Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Random House).

Endowed by the late Arthur Ross in 2001, this award recognizes nonfiction works, in English or translation, that merit special attention for bringing forth new information that changes the understanding of events or problems, developing analytical approaches that allow new and different insights into critical issues, or providing new ideas that help resolve foreign policy problems.

PAST WINNERS OF THE ARTHUR ROSS BOOK AWARD

Liaquat Ahamed for Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Penguin Group)

Philip P. Pan for Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (Simon & Schuster)

Paul Collier for The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford University Press)

Kwame Anthony Appiah for Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W.W. Norton)

Tony Judt for Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Press)

Steve Coll for Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin Press)

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon for The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against America (Random House)

Samantha Power for “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books)

Robert Skidelsky for John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom 1937-1946 (Viking)

ARTHUR ROSS BOOK AWARD JURY

Stanley Hoffmann, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, Harvard University

James F. Hoge Jr. (Chairman), Counselor, CFR

Robert W. Kagan, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, The Brookings Institution

Miles Kahler, Rohr Professor of Pacific International Relations, University of California, San Diego

Mary Elise Sarotte, Professor of International Relations, University of Southern California

Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University