Urban geographer wins Nine Dots Prize for 'radically legal' study

Urban geographer Joanna Kusiak has been awarded the 2022/23 Nine Dots Prize for her 'exciting' and 'provocative' response to the question, 'Why has the rule of law become so fragile?' 

A book not yet written

The Nine Dots Prize is a prize for 'a book that has not yet been written'. Running every two years, people around the world are invited to respond to a question - set by a global board of 12 leading academics, journalists and thinkers - with a 3,000 word essay and book proposal. The submissions -  about 600 from more than 50 countries this year - are judged anonymously.  

Kusiak's winning essay argues that the rule of law has always been fragile, a result of its paradoxical foundations which bind together law and politics. The academic takes the case of the 2021 Berlin referendum, in which voters decided to expropriate more than 200,000 properties from corporate landlords. Kusiak demonstrates the potential of radically legal politics as a path to deepen our democracies and renew the rule of law.  

Mandy Hill, Managing Director of Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press, said: "Dr Joanna Kusiak's insightful, stimulating work on the rule of law is a worthy and timely winner." 

Her work epitomises Cambridge University Press's values: enabling inspirational and contested ideas and voices to reach a wider audience. We are excited to support her to convert her work into book form. 

A radically legal work of love 

Nine Dots Prize winner, Dr Joanna Kusiak, a Junior Research Fellow in Urban Studies at King's College, Cambridge, said: "The rule of law promises that all people are free and equal, yet too often it fails to deliver on its promise, getting entangled by power. My book, provisionally entitled Radically Legal, showcases how social movements in Berlin and Warsaw work with the law to renew its emancipatory potential." 

My proposal was the work of love, and I feel elevated by winning the Nine Dots Prize. I am a scholar-activist, which means I only engage with the topics that I believe are socially important.

The US$100,000 prize will enable the winner to spend time researching, developing ideas and turning their essay response into a full-length book to be published by Cambridge University Press open access, meaning the book can be downloaded free of charge. The book will explore the following: 

• The story of the Berlin movement and its daring attempt to take housing back from corporations, leveraging the German constitution. 
• The relationship between law and justice, and the misuse of the law by powerful forces including financial capitalism. 
• How Jungian psychoanalysis can reveal the rule of law's 'midlife crisis', presenting politics as the 'shadow' of the law. 
• The tension between private law and Germany's constitution which protects fundamental rights over the needs of any economic system. 
• How radically legal can redirect the conservative nature of the law towards a progressive future, achieving progressive change within and beyond the law. 
• Kusiak's personal experience as a scholar-activist working in Berlin and Warsaw to contribute to the development of progressive social movements. 
• What Berlin could look like through deprivatising housing - an inclusive vision of a liveable city that unlocks creativity and freedom. 

New voice 

Nine Dots Prize board member and judge, Professor David Runciman, said of Kusiak's winning entry: "What's so exciting about this proposal from a new voice is the way it mixes the urgency of contemporary politics with the complexity of recent history. Nowhere has the rule of law been subject to more violently different interpretations than in Berlin over the last century... Not everyone will agree with what's in this book, but it is sure to provoke fierce argument, which is what the Nine Dots Prize is for."