Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter examines the development of comparisons in global crime governance, focusing on the question of whether comparisons based on statistics are used as mapping and ordering tools, irrespective of their quality. Recent decades have witnessed a growing proliferation of data on global crime and its governance, impacting political decision making and global governance. Yet, comparisons and statistical data on crime have traditionally been criticized for their inherent problems. Starting from a historical perspective, this chapter first presents the supply and demand of comparisons and numbers in global crime governance. It then turns to the role of comparisons in policy making on crime and to what kind of assessments are common in global crime governance. In a third step, it examines the utility of statistical data on crime for mapping and ordering. Focusing on a variety of crime areas ranging from money laundering to cybercrime, this chapter illustrates that comparisons as ordering tools can exist widely independent of data quality. All in all, the chapter shows that the role of statistical knowledge is often rather ornamental in political decision making on crime, and less informative in the strict sense of the term.
This chapter examines the evolution of knowledge production on maritime security. It explores how issues such as piracy, smuggling or illicit fishing have led to a flurry of global knowledge processes and underlie contemporary understandings of maritime security. The discussion highlights the role of epistemic infrastructures in making oceanic activities visible and informing security policies. These infrastructures record and classify maritime activities, enabling comparative analysis and shaping political priorities. The chapter identifies a plurality of epistemic infrastructures, each with its own methodologies and classifications, reflecting regional priorities and debates over whether maritime security should be addressed locally or globally. Through case studies on piracy quantification and maritime domain awareness centres, the chapter illustrates the diverse range of infrastructures and evinces the disorderly character of knowledge production underlying maritime security policies.
This chapter explores practices of naval force comparisons as a means to visualize and quantify the status hierarchy of the naval powers and the influence of these comparisons on the global naval arms competition in the period between 1889 and 1922. By drawing on examples primarily from Great Britain, France and Germany, the chapter shows how these comparisons were used as arguments to legitimize or delegitimize demands for naval build-ups and how contemporaries perceived comparative practices as a means to fight the battles of the ‘cold war’ before 1914 and to make use of naval power in peace. The chapter secondly teases out the interrelation between naval force comparisons, status concerns and the global naval arms competition that emerged among the great powers in the last decade of the 19th century. By doing so, the chapter highlights the prevalence of quantification as a mode of knowledge production and the effects that it had both on the security agenda (by making naval armaments a key issue) and global security politics (by fuelling a competition over naval power).
This chapter unpacks a prominent mode of the production and presentation of comparative knowledge: visualization. Visualization usually involves a variety of technical images such as charts, diagrams, figures and maps. Yet, very little is known how these technical images shape the discourses on security, power and strength nationally, regionally and globally. How are resources and capabilities envisioned literally? How do such visualizations contribute to the governance of military objects and the politics of security? The chapter introduces visual discourse analysis as a method for unpacking the visual dimension of comparative practices. It illustrates the necessity and added value of such a perspective by studying a prominent element of NATO’s public legitimation campaign during the renewed arms race in the 1980s: the ‘Force Comparisons’ booklet that NATO published in 1984. In addition to providing insights into how comparative knowledge is visualized, the chapter shows how visualizations (re-)shape the security agenda by reinforcing particular visions of what security politics is supposedly about – in NATO’s case its quest to re-balance the military balance in Europe through a military build-up.
Measuring status in world politics is difficult. Because scholars cannot directly observe international status, they frequently turn to blunt proxies, such as diplomatic exchange. Yet the validity of these proxies as measures of comparative knowledge is questionable. In particular, these measures are not well suited for exploring what drives variation in perceptions of where states fit in the international hierarchy. This chapter proposes an alternative means of exploring perceptions of the relative status of states by using survey experiments, which avoid many of the disadvantages associated with commonly employed state-level observational measures. Inspired by field theory, this approach uses a conjoint design which permits the simultaneous variation of many general and specific potential status-related goods and characteristics, thereby enabling more precise measurements of each factor’s contributions to observers’ estimates of status. The chapter applies this technique to the field of space exploration, frequently mentioned as an area of status competition.
This chapter addresses the production and effects of comparisons in debates on the security implications of technological change. Focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), it offers insights into the links between technological innovations, states’ assessment of the international distribution of power, and their foreign policy choices. While there is a growing debate about the relevance of AI for world politics, less attention has been paid to the discursive processes through which agents faced with questions of power ascribe meaning to technological innovations in the first place. This chapter argues that an intertwined set of narratives and comparisons contributes to the construction of AI as the centre of a race between the US and China. To illustrate this point, it studies the case of the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). In particular, the chapter analyses policy documents accompanying the Commission’s work and studies the steps taken by the US government in the aftermath. The findings demonstrate that the specific ways of narrating AI and of comparing states in respect to their deployment of this technology not just describe, but also reinforce competitive dynamics and subsequently shape US policies.
