The recipient of the 2026 Michel de Montaigne Endowed Prize in the History of Ideas is Jordan Kiper, Ph.D., assistant professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department Anthropology. This prestigious academic award recognizes his essay “Criminalizing Hate Speech in the Balkans: Rethinking the Threshold Problem and Endgame Analysis of Dangerous Speech in International Criminal Law.”
Kiper’s CAS colleagues chose his work for this honor from a record number of submissions. The selection committee remarked, "This was a splendid piece of research and writing—intellectually rich and morally informed. Based on deep experience working on transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia, the author offers a plausible proposal for how human rights law can tackle hate speech and punish provocations to genocide.”
The Michel de Montaigne Endowed Prize in the History of Ideas includes a $1,000 award, as well as a plaque to commemorate Kiper’s achievement.
