Penn International Relations Lecturer Receives International Prize

Thomas Cavanna, a lecturer in Penn’s International Relations Program, has received the Jean-Baptiste Duroselle Prize for his dissertation “American Foreign Policy Towards India and Pakistan in the 1970s.” Named after a French diplomatic historian, the Duroselle Prize is granted in France each year by a jury of academics to a dissertation on the history of international relations.

Cavanna received his doctorate from Sciences Po in 2012. During his doctoral studies, he was a Fox International Fellow at Yale University and interned at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CNRS), a French research center located in New Delhi.

In his dissertation, he identifies four turning points of U.S. foreign policy in the subcontinent during the decade. Cavanna analyzes the impact of the U.S., India, and Pakistan, but also the influence of the other main powers involved in the region. He describes the way the American policy in South Asia was affected by Washington’s triangular relations with the USSR and China, by its fear of decline in the wake of the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal, and by transnational phenomena like the rise of Islamism in the Middle East in the late 1970s.