My essay Assimilationism vs Multiculturalism has won the 3 Quarks Daily Politics and Social Science Prize for 2015. My thanks to 3 Quarks Daily (which, if you don’t know already, is a superb web-based magazine/portal) and to Kenneth Roth, of Human Rights Watch, who judged the competition.

The other winning essays were Xavier Marquez’s The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm and Omar Ali’s Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo… And the full list of the other finalists:

Misha Leptic, Notes of a Grand Juror (3 Quarks Daily)
Justin Erik Halldór Smith, Abandoning Ukraine
Zahir Kazmi, ,The Limits of Muslim Liberalism (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Patrick O’Donnell, The Highlander Folk school: a Civil rights Movement Halfway House
(Religious Left Law)
Thomas Wells, The Robot Economy and the Crisis of Capitalism: Why We Need Nniversal Basic Income (The Philosopher’s Beard)
LD Burnett,  How the CIA Bought Juan Rulfo Some Land in the Country (US Intellectual History)

This is in fact the third time I have won this prize: Last year Mark Blyth picked my essay In Defence of Diversity and in 2011, when Stephen M Walt was the judge, Rethinking the Idea of Christian Europe was the winner. A hat-trick of wins is a real honour.

The photo is of star trails taken at Cerro Armazones, in the Chilean Andes. Credit: ESO/S. Brunier, via Red Orbit.