At its regular session, the Scientific Council of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade decided to award the 2026 ‘Miladin Životić’ Annual Prize for Critical-Theoretical Engagement to Professor Francis Fukuyama.
This decision was made upon the recommendation of an expert Commission appointed by the Scientific Council, whose report highlighted Professor Fukuyama’s outstanding contribution to contemporary political theory and the public sphere.
About the Laureate
Professor Francis Fukuyama is a world-renowned political scientist, a Senior Fellow, and a member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Throughout his distinguished academic career, he has held prominent professorial and directorial positions at prestigious institutions, including Johns Hopkins University and George Mason University. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University under the supervision of Samuel P. Huntington. He is the author of a series of epochal works that have shaped contemporary political thought, most notably The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Trust (1995), The Origins of Political Order (2011), Identity (2018), and Liberalism and Its Discontents (2022).
Professor Fukuyama is widely recognised in the broader public sphere for his famous ‘end of history’ thesis. Contrary to simplistic and frequently erroneous interpretations that reduce this concept to the absence of empirical socio-political upheavals or any ideological challenges to liberal democracy, Fukuyama’s argument rests upon a deeply Hegelian understanding of the historical process. According to this view, political and economic liberalism demonstrate the capacity to resolve core social conflicts and contradictions through institutional mechanisms, thereby posing a fundamental challenge to any potential emancipatory alternative that claims to truly transcend liberal democracy.
It is precisely this provocative and theoretically rigorous argument that renders Francis Fukuyama an engaged theorist in the noblest sense of the term. For decades, his perspective has relentlessly compelled both the defenders of liberal democracy and its most thoughtful anti-capitalist and left-wing critics to step outside their theoretical comfort zones and formulate radically innovative concepts of social progress. In the spirit of Theodor Adorno’s observation that ‘nowadays only exaggeration can be the medium of truth’, Fukuyama’s thesis acts as a theoretical catalyst, pushing us towards the outermost limits of our cognitive and political possibilities.
The award ceremony will take place this December in Belgrade. This event represents not only a recognition of Professor Francis Fukuyama’s oeuvre, but also a reaffirmation of the international reputation of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, which in previous years has hosted and awarded this prize to major figures on the global intellectual scene, including Joseph Stiglitz, Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, Étienne Balibar, Thomas Piketty, and Maria Todorova.
Image source: https://fukuyama.people.stanford.edu/