The Robert O. Keohane award acknowledges Keohane's years of service to IO and his support of junior scholars. The award is presented annually, usually in September, to the best research article in IO published by an untenured scholar (or scholars) in the previous calendar year.

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The award committee made up of Michaela Mattes, Michael Barnett, and James Vreeland had this to say about Landau-Wells' winning article:

“Building from the Brain” is a doubly agenda-setting article: it forces scholars to reconsider prominent assumptions about threat perception and introduces a new type of meta-analysis of neuroimaging data that can enrich IR research. “Building from the Brain” starts with a brush-clearing exercise that distills two conceptualizations of threat perception that pervade the literature: “threats-as-danger” and “threats-as-signals.” Landau-Wells uses neuroimaging techniques to assess the evidentiary basis for these influential assumptions about threat perceptions in IR theories.

First, she finds, in contrast to what rationalist theories assume, that individuals do not treat “threats-as-dangers” akin to economic costs. Reasoning about threats is more complex and thus more prone to prompt behaviors that depart from standard conceptualizations rationality — consequently, heuristic decision-making models may provide more fitting analytical frameworks.

Second, rather than treating others’ intentions as unknowable—as is often posited by both rationalist and behavioral theories—decision-makers seek to puzzle out the intentions of their counterparts, and this exercise can trigger a defiant response. Landau-Wells brain-level analysis can thus explain why increasing a threat signal’s costliness does not necessarily lead to retreat but might instead provoke resistance.

“Building from the Brain” brings frontier methodologies from neuroscience to bear on core international relations topics. Landau-Wells introduces a new type of large-scale brain-level data: coordinate-based meta analyses (CBMAs) based, in her article, on 500 neuroimaging studies of over 11,000 individuals. This approach thus sidesteps a frequent concern with MRI studies on only a small number of subjects and lends itself to more generalizable conclusions. The empirical analyses are carefully executed, with particular attention paid to potential criticisms and limitations, and is accessible to non-expert readers.

Among a strong pool of eligible articles, “Building from the Brain” stood out in its originality and its potential to shape large swaths of scholarship that rely on the concept of threat perceptions. Some of the assumptions and conclusions to date do not match what actually goes on in the brain, and a better understanding of brain functioning may allow IR scholars to revise existing theories and devise new ones. The same approach also holds promise to examine other well-established psychological concepts in IR.