After a two-year wait, Jason Lyall of Dartmouth College received the 2020 Furniss Book Award for Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War. Lyall was awarded the prize in 2020, but due to COVID-19, the award and lecture were finally given this past Thursday. Lyall said this was his first speaking engagement since the pandemic to the gathered in-person and virtual audience and that he was honored to receive the award.  

Lyall built a new dataset for Divided Armies, Project Mars, to incorporate excluded belligerents and wars. A team of 134 coders worked for nearly seven years to add 124 new belligerents and dozens of wars not included in the Correlates of War for 1800-2011. Lyall said that recent scholarship had called attention to how western-centric biases shape our understandings of war - including which belligerents and wars matter for studies. He hopes that much of the research from Divided Armies can help scholars explore non-western wars and cases. 

You can watch Lyall's talk in full on the Mershon Center YouTube channel. The 2021 Edgar S. Furniss Book Award winner will be announced this Spring.