The Winner of the “André Corvisier Prize 2026” for Ph.D. Theses in Military History
The President and the Executive Board of the ICMH announce on 20 April 2025, that the Jury, after a careful process of selection, decided to award the 2026 André Corvisier Prize to Dr. M. Hugo Tierny, of the Université de Paris, for his well-researched and exceptional thesis: “Stratégies d'accès et de déni d’accès aux portes maritimes et continentales de la Chine – les cas de Taiwan et du Xinjiang depuis la dynastie Qing”.
The author states in his abstract: “This dissertation aims to compare the roles of Taiwan and Xinjiang in China's history, military representations, and geostrategic framework since the Qing dynasty. Drawing on Chinese sources, we will explore a long-term parallel between east and west, ocean and continent, in China's military strategies. These links will be examined through the entrenched Chinese use of ‘access and denial strategies’ towards Taiwan and Xinjiang, defined as China's recurring and historical quest for extensive strategic depth on both its continental and maritime peripheries, combining military and non-military means to expel foreign influences and prevent them from posing threats. We will demonstrate that occupying both islands and deserts has been a priority for Chinese strategists since the Qing conquests of Xinjiang and Taiwan, driven by the court's concern that these lands could be used against the Empire by hostile powers. Yet, subsequent Chinese regimes inherited these strategic representations and ambitions, as evidenced by the writings of their eminent strategists. Throughout history and into the present, China's notion of access to these strategic locations corresponds to a desire to deny such access to foreign adversaries. The Chinese military's ability to defend Xinjiang and Taiwan has always depended on an evolving power balance between China and its rivals (nomads, pirates, Russians, Japanese, Americans), highlighting an ancestral difficulty of fighting on both fronts simultaneously. These lands were among the first to be affected by China's cycles of expansion and contraction: when powerful, China extended its reach; when weak, it withdrew. Consequently, having long had to choose between protecting Taiwan or Xinjiang — each being considered a “fortress for national defense”, as Chiang Kai-shek wrote — China now seeks to be sufficiently rich and powerful to secure both maritime and continental approaches perceived as potential springboards to Eurasia and the high seas. From this dual study of China's continental and maritime movements, a field we are the first to thoroughly investigate, we uncover numerous interdependencies between east and west in Chinese geostrategy, as well as historical constants. These links appear not only horizontally, through the resemblance of contemporary policies towards Taiwan and Xinjiang, but also, as Marc Bloch would suggest, vertically, since past policies clearly prefigure Beijing's current strategies towards these two lands. Thus, while a distinction has long been made between China's geostrategic and military objectives in the east and west, towards the ocean and the continent, we will instead demonstrate their similarity, complementarity, and continuity.”
The ICMH Jury has awarded an additional outstanding thesis with the distinction of “Honourable Mention”. This excellent thesis is Dr. Geoffrey Koenig’s, of the Université de Strasbourg, “Sieg um jeden Preis ! La ténacité de la Wehrmacht sur le front de l’Ouest et l’idéologie nationale-socialiste (juin 1944 – mai 1945)”.
The 2026 Corvisier Prize will be awarded at the LI ICMH Congress, in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil.