ASIA MEDIA INTERNATIONAL WRITES — Academically distinguished as well as globally controversial, Princeton University emeritus professor Richard A. Falk is announced as the winner of the Best Book Award, 2021. by the Global Policy Institute of Loyola Marymount University. Past winners of the GPI’s prestigious annual award include Harvard University’s Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt for their ‘How Democracies Die’, and ‘internationally acclaimed Soft Power’ Professor Joseph N. Nye Jr, also of Harvard, for his influential books on America’s role in the world.
This year’s award-winning book is PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim (Clarity 2021), a sprawling and endlessly insightful and opinionated autobiography by Princeton University’s Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice. Falk, now a Santa Barbara Resident after four decades at Princeton, retired from full-time university teaching in 2001, but has served as Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has lectured widely around the world as one of America’s most recognizable and relentless crusaders for international justice.
The 2001 Best Book awardee is also a member of the Editorial Boards of The Nation and The Progressive, and Chair of the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is a former advisory board member of the World Federalist Institute and the American Movement for World Government. Notably, Dr Falk acted as counsel to Ethiopia and Liberia in the famous South West Africa Cases (1965) that came before the International Court of Justice; and during 1999–2000, Falk worked on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. In 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Falk to a six-year term as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. In that high-profile role, his consistently critical findings on repression of and denial of human rights for Palestinians eventually led to his being banned from Israel by extremely annoyed Israeli governments.
Dr Falk, born in New York, holds a doctorate in law from Harvard and an LLB from Yale, and is married to Hilal Elver, who holds an SJD from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law and a PhD from the University of Ankara School of Law. She is an editor at the Middle East Research and Information Project and past UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (2014-2020. PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL is receiving overwhelming praise from some of the globe’s more prominent intellectuals. Noam Chomsky called it “intimate and penetrating … a gripping story.” Dr. Vandana Shiva: “Whether you are a peace activist or a researcher … Public Intellectual will enrich you intellectually and spiritually.” Dr. Cornel West: “Richard Falk is one of the great public intellectuals … who has preserved his integrity and consistency in our dark and decadent times. This wise and powerful memoir is a gift…”
The prestigious Global Policy Institute 2001 Best Book Award will be presented in a gala reception at the Del Rey Yacht Club, near the LMU campus, by Michael Genovese, GPI president, professor of Political Science and International Relations, and Institute for Leadership Studies director; and by Professor Tom Plate of Asia Media International.