The AnthroState Best Article Award recognises an outstanding peer-reviewed article that makes a significant contribution to debates in the anthropology of the state. Established by the EASA Anthropology of the State Network (AnthroState) in 2026, the award celebrates and promotes excellence in scholarship on the anthropology of the state.
As 2026 marked the inaugural year of the award, the network conveners extended eligibility to articles published during the previous three years, rather than limiting consideration to those published in the current or preceding year. Articles could be nominated by anyone, including their authors.
We are delighted to announce that the recipient of the AnthroState Best Article Award 2026 is:
José Ciro Martínez and Omar Sirri for their article:
Martínez, José Ciro, and Omar Sirri. 2023. “Bureaucraft: Statemakers in Amman and Baghdad.” Cultural Anthropology 38 (3). https://doi.org/10.14506/ca38.3.04
Martínez and Sirri’s article offers a subtle and richly ethnographic account of how the state is produced and experienced through everyday practice. Rather than treating the state as an abstract institutional structure or a set of formal rules, the authors show how it is continually enacted by people whose work brings them into direct contact with citizens. Through an innovative comparison of subsidised bread bakers and soldiers in Amman and Baghdad, they demonstrate that the state—like bread—is not simply the product of written recipes or regulations, but of practical knowledge cultivated through long-term experience. This “bureaucraft” enables state actors to know how to respond to situations that cannot be reduced to bureaucratic procedures alone.
The article’s comparative perspective is particularly compelling. Bakers and soldiers alike perform the state, yet they do so in profoundly different ways. Bakers produce the bread that sustains everyday life, while soldiers embody the state’s capacity for coercion and violence. By juxtaposing these two forms of state-making, Martínez and Sirri illuminate the tensions and contradictions inherent in state power, revealing how care, service, authority and violence are intertwined in the ordinary workings of governance.
Although the article introduces the concept of bureaucraft, its greatest contribution lies not in proposing a new theoretical vocabulary, but in its exceptionally nuanced ethnographic demonstration of how the state emerges through mundane encounters and embodied practice. It reminds us that the same commitment to serving the public and performing one’s duties well can generate both reassuring and deeply troubling effects. In doing so, the article exemplifies the kind of empirically grounded, theoretically insightful scholarship that continues to shape the anthropology of the state.
We warmly congratulate José Ciro Martínez and Omar Sirri on receiving the inaugural AnthroState Best Article Award.
We also thank and congratulate the other three finalists:
Alpes, Maybritt Jill. 2026. ‘Truth-Claim Capital at Borders: The Role of Trust in the State at a Regional Human Rights Court’. Social & Legal Studies 35 (3): 313–30. doi:10.1177/09646639251364483.
Not all claims are born equal – even in European Court of Justice, as demonstrates this insightful article by Alpes. Having direct participant experience while working several years in the Cyprus-Lebanon pushback corridor as a member of collective of civil society organizations and later working towards submitting a case to the European Court of Justice, she skillfully argues that the truth-claims of the state are given almost complete monopoly over those of the migrants who are expected to collect evidence of proofs that do not exist because the state institutions intentionally failed to produce them. The article excels in providing insight on how the state operates and manipulates the “truth-claim capital” to achieve the winning position in claims against the wrongdoings of the state apparatus.
Kapazoglou, Martha. 2026. ‘Abandoned by the State?: Precarious Municipal Workers and Their Indigent Clients in Greece’. Ethnos, April, 1–17. doi:10.1080/00141844.2026.2655333.
Martha Kapazoglou’s article immerses the reader in the everyday experiences of the frontline state employees in Greece demonstrating that after the austerity policies were set in place, many of them found hard to distinguish themselves from the people whom they are supposed to help with state aid. Indeed some employees are at the same time also beneficiaries of the aid system. This precarious situation, Kapazoglou argues, explains how resentement and contempt can co-exist with sense of duty and service to the citizens in need. Kapazoglou provides an excellent picture of how the state gets enacted showing that state has hardly any insde.
Millar, Stefan. 2026. ‘The Chief of Lähiö: Retirement and Ageing States in Helsinki, Finland’. Anthropology & Aging 47 (1): 21–35. doi:10.5195/aa.2026.588.
Directly engaging in debates over the nature and experience of the state, Millar argues that these are not static but change as the subjects age. To substantiate this argument, Millar befriends the reader with John, a man who came to Finland 30 years ago from Sierra Leone but has failed to obtain citizenship, yet. When John retires, the interaction with the state changes significantly from distrust and distance to more supportive and cooperative. Millar’s article opens up a novel perspective for anthropological inquiry of the state suggesting that ageing is an important perspective to be taken into consideration when analysing the state.
The selection procedure:
The Jury
The jury consisted of
- two external reviewers both of whom were previously invited to be keynote speakers in AnthroState conferences (in Riga and Amsterdam):
- Rebecca Bryant
- Alice von Bieberstein
- the AnthrState network conveners
The Criteria
Four finalists were selected out of the submitted pool of articles. These were evaluated according to four criteria:
- Contribution to debates in the anthropology of the state;
- Originality and development of the theoretical argument;
- Empirical grounding and analytical depth;
- Overall quality of the article;
The Procedure
The selection of the articles consisted of two stages. First, out of all suggested articles four were selected for the final shortlist. Second, the winner was chosen among the shortlisted Finalists.
