Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the 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
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Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
How have efforts to govern nature and address urgent global environmental challenges shaped, transformed or undermined processes of world ordering?
Chapters in this book explore how efforts to govern nature have transformed – or are transforming – how we understand and practice world politics. Bringing together a team of contributors from around the world, the book traces this inquiry across diverse international policy fields, from security and peacebuilding through science cooperation and governing ecosystems to the politics of economic growth. Taken together, the book offers a conceptually ambitious and empirically grounded account of how the governance of nature and the making of world order intertwine and calls for a research agenda to attend to the growing impact of this interrelationship.
Europe’s security environment was fundamentally altered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which gave fresh impetus to states to apply for NATO membership. This book, written by leading experts on European defence, analyses NATO’s northern expansion, detailing the unique dynamics that forged Finland and Sweden’s path to NATO membership.
The book uses resources in Swedish, Finnish and English to offer a balanced study of both political and military aspects of NATO enlargement. Exploring the pressing issues that NATO will need to tackle, particularly in Northern Europe, the book considers the potential repercussions the newest round of NATO enlargement will have on European and global security.
This book explores how political actors draw on memories of violent pasts to generate political power and legitimacy in the present. Drawing on fieldwork in post-violence Cambodia, Rwanda and Indonesia, the book demonstrates in what way power is derived from how roles are assigned, exploring who is deemed a perpetrator, victim or hero, as well as uncertainties in this memory.
The author interrogates the ways in which these roles are attributed and ambivalences created in each society’s political discourses, transitional justice processes and cultural heritage. The comparative empirical analysis illustrates the importance of memory for political power and legitimacy today.
Available open access digitally under CC BY NC ND licence.
Preventing Violence argues that we can move towards safer and better societies by advancing holistic public health approaches to violence prevention.
It explores the serious limitations of contemporary public health approaches and proposes an alternative path forward. Based on data from a three-year, ESRC-funded project, Public Health, Youth and Violence Reduction, it also examines in-depth the work of 20 Violence Reduction Units in England and Wales.
The book makes clear recommendations for policy makers, practitioners and researchers working to prevent violence and improve the lives of children and young people.
The EU’s international environment is increasingly characterized by power politics, great-power rivalry, ideological contestation and war. This has challenged the liberal-internationalist identity that has been at the heart of the EU since its birth. This book examines how the EU has responded to these new realities. It analyses the introduction of a flurry of concepts including European sovereignty, strategic autonomy, civilization, responsibility and strategic compass, and asks whether these signal a reconsideration of foreign policy objectives, a new strategic orientation or possibly a paradigm shift.
The book develops a theoretical framework on policy paradigms, worldviews, grand strategy, strategic narratives and the drivers of institutional change followed by chapters on the anti-liberal challenge, the evolution of the EU framework of ideas, the search for grand strategy and strategic autonomy, the response to Russian aggression and imperial thinking, and continuity and change in EU unity, working groups, green leadership and strategic communication.
This book investigates China’s use of a self-created regional organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), to shape global norms. It argues that self-created regional organizations constitute ideal platforms for emerging powers to promote their normative views internationally. On the one hand, they can serve as frameworks within which to institutionalize the power’s norms, and on the other, they can assist in the dissemination of these norms among a larger group of states. As the first and most established regional organization ever initiated by China, analysis of the SCO provides crucial insights into the Chinese government’s ambitions for norms and rules of contemporary international relations. Based on the analysis of over 400 hand-coded original Chinese-language documents and 18 semi-structured interviews, the research finds that China has used the SCO as a regional platform that both represents and helps promote China’s core normative views and concepts internationally. The organization has institutionalized these formally and in practical actions, and proactively engages in promoting its normative system among a large group of states, including on the stage of the United Nations. The study furthermore finds that numerous states beyond the SCO already share many of the norms and values promoted by the organization, making apparent the contours of an emerging international society that could become an alternative to liberal international society.
Coinciding with a wave of drug policy liberalization around the world, this book analyzes the experiences of Argentina, Portugal and Uruguay in their efforts at depenalization, decriminalization and legalization/regulation of recreational drugs. The authors present the successes and challenges of the approaches and their impacts on drug use, public health and security, debunking some of the myths surrounding flexible drug policies along the way.
Contrasting the three liberalization cases with the criminalization approach of the US at federal level, the book offers policy recommendations and lessons learned from the historical trajectories and policy reforms in addressing drug consumption and its associated harms.
This edited volume examines the crucial, yet overlooked, role narratives play in the rapidly changing relationship between Europe and China.
Its contributors analyze the role of narratives in different societies and arenas ranging from economic and foreign policy to history and social media. Emphasizing the social dimension of narrative, the volume challenges traditional state-centric and strategic approaches in international politics. It also engages with the ubiquity of stories about the “other” in present manifold crises, and underscores the need for a heightened awareness of narratives and their consequences in decision-making processes.
Using Northern Ireland as a compelling case study, this book offers a critique of peacebuilding approaches with young people in contested societies. In the north of Ireland, the spectre of murderous violence is increasingly distant for peace-agreement generations. However, legacies stemming from the 30 years of protracted conflict are ever-present in young people’s segregated lives.
This book presents four distinctive viewpoints that inform contemporary peacebuilding work with young people, revealing divergent purposes and conflicting aspirations. Offering a new model to understand peacebuilding, the authors urge peacebuilding communities around the globe to embrace an increasingly politicising and participative youth peace praxis.
The recovery movement has gained significant traction in both the mental health and addictions field in the last 20 years, as a strengths-based approach to building long-term wellbeing. From this transition has come a need for process and outcome measures that are strengths-based and that has resulted in the development initially of the concept of recovery capital and more recently, the operationalisation and quantification of this approach.
This book provides a clear and accessible history of the development of this concept, and then looks at how the concept has been operationalised and used for a range of purposes. The first main theme is around the conceptual origins of the term and its relationship to strengths-based approaches to addressing behavioural health issues. The second is around the idea that recovery, previously regarded as a subjective concept hard to quantify and capture, can be operationalised effectively through the concept of recovery capital. The third core theme will be the progress to date in mapping and measuring recovery capital – reviewing the multiple scales that have been developed and published in this area and the underlying evidence base for each of these. The final section will review the impact this has had on the field in terms of changing practice and improving the quality of services that are available to people at different stages of their recovery journey.
The core aim of the book is to bring all of the existing evidence on recovery capital measurement and its application together, and to become the definitive and ‘go to’ book on this topic for researchers, policy makers, practitioners and people in recovery.
