SFI External Professor Allison Stanger (Middlebury College) has been named a Berlin Prize Fellow by the American Academy in Berlin for the 2026–27 academic year.
Awarded annually to U.S.-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists, the Berlin Prize gives leaders in the humanities, social sciences, public affairs, and the arts the time and resources to advance a project during a semester in residence at the Academy.
Stanger's project, "Democracy in the Age of Cryptocurrency: A Global Governance Challenge," asks how democratic societies can govern a technology that operates beyond national borders, and that no single country controls.
It pairs a historical analysis of money, going from ancient coins to modern cryptocurrencies, with a study of whether citizens' assemblies — groups of ordinary people convened to address complex policy questions — could help write rules for digital currencies that are transparent, accountable, and resistant to industry influence.
"Money has never been just a technology — it's a mirror of the political institutions behind it," Stanger says. "The rules for global digital currencies are currently being written by industry insiders and fragmented national regulators — everyone, in other words, except ordinary citizens, who bear most of the risk. Citizens' assemblies have shown they can tackle remarkably technical questions, from climate policy to constitutional reform. I want to explore whether that same deliberative capacity can be brought to bear on the money of the future."
The project extends Stanger's broader argument that cryptocurrency, as currently implemented, risks becoming a "digital Wild West" in which sophisticated actors profit while ordinary investors bear the risk, threatening democratic accountability. It also builds toward her forthcoming book, Who Elected Big Tech? (Yale University Press) which will be available in March 2027.