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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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.
This book examines the progress of the development of public policy evaluation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region from multiple perspectives. It describes both past developments and the current state of evaluation across the region, focusing on how political regimes, administrative traditions and policy advisory systems shape evaluation processes in different contexts.
With contributions from a diverse list of international authors, it investigates the historical development of evaluation across the MENA region and analyses the political landscape, highlighting emerging trends and potential challenges that could influence the future of the field.
An essential resource for researchers and practitioners in evaluation, public policy and the MENA region, the book also provides students with the practical knowledge and essential skills needed for careers in evaluation and policy analysis.
Taking account of its evolution in recent decades, this book provides an up-to-date account of the role of the Civil Service in the UK.
The book offers a much-needed re-examination of the function and role of the Civil Service and considers the ways in which it has changed in response to today’s pressures. It examines the changing relationships between ministers, civil servants and special advisers (spADs), as well as investigating challenges to the principles of the Civil Service such as service outsourcing, COVID-19 responses and Brexit.
Asking whether the practices of the past are effective for the future, this book is a vital resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of UK politics, public administration and public sector management.
This book explores how girls negotiate girl power discourses in international development, taking a campaign focused on fundraising for girls’ education and adapting it to match their own activist goals within their communities. The book traces the evolution of the UN Foundation’s Girl Up campaign in its first decade from 2010 to 2020, showing how it has developed from a focus on fundraising for girls’ education in the Global South to supporting girls’ activism globally. Using focus groups with Girl Up members in the UK, the US and Malawi, the book shows how they negotiate participating in the campaign, and the stigma they often face as a result, with creativity, humour and pragmatism. They gave talks on feminism to their fellow students, supported and mentored other girls, resisted hostility towards Girl Up and engaged in the wider feminist movement, despite the many barriers to their activism that adults placed in their way. Unlike spectacular media and nongovernmental organization (NGO) narratives of girls saving the world all by themselves, these girl activists frequently struggled to be heard and respected. They continued their activism regardless, and the book concludes with suggestions for some of the many ways in which adults, schools, NGOs and allies might better support them to make the world a fairer place for girls.
As the cost of living rises, British households face unprecedented levels of debt. But many commentators characterise those who stash away envelopes, leave telephones ringing, or hide from debt collectors as irresponsible.
The first full-length ethnography of debt problems in Britain, this book uses long-term fieldwork on a southern English housing estate to give a sensitive retelling of the everyday lives of indebted people.
It argues that the inequalities of debt go beyond economic questions to include the way state coercion hinders people’s efforts to define what they truly value. Indeed, from finance to housing and even parenthood, the potential for dispossession has become a pervasive method of power that strikes at the heart of personal life.
This book delves into the intricate landscape of citizenship practices in Central and Eastern Europe, an area often overlooked in research.
Through an interdisciplinary lens, the contributors explore how education and political participation shape these practices in a region marked by historical and social complexities. The book offers fresh insights into how citizenship is perceived and practiced, highlighting the role of civic education in fostering political engagement.
By addressing both the challenges and opportunities of citizenship in this dynamic region, this volume contributes to broader debates on democracy and civic participation across Europe and beyond.
Following the highly respected first volume, this book continues to provide a holistic view of Julio Boltvinik’s vast and important work on poverty conceptualisation and measurement. While the previous book introduced the author’s widely adopted Integrated Poverty Measurement Method (IPMM), this new volume outlines his Marxian approach to poverty and human flourishing, focusing on what he conceptualises as human poverty.
Bringing together 20 years of research, this interdisciplinary book provides an alternative to Sen’s Capability approach and details its internal consistency, solid foundations and promising perspectives for applicability.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY licence.
Development and environmental challenges are often framed at the global or planetary scale, but in a vague or apolitical manner. This book develops a theoretically rigorous and politicized concept of the planetary to intervene in contemporary debates on global development, and to enhance our critical understanding of development as we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Chapters explore key themes and processes including urbanization, demographic change, health, financialization, and infrastructure development. Referencing diverse cases and examples drawn from across the world, the book argues that the futures of global development are inseparable from environmental challenges and transformations.
This book examines ‘land grabbing’ – its colonial roots and the fraught relationship between capital and nature amidst the current ecological crisis.
Through ethnographic and archival research, Maura Benegiamo investigates an Italian company’s acquisition of 20,000 hectares in Senegal’s River Delta for agrofuel production and delves into the struggles of pastoral communities affected by the project. Through this landmark case, the book shows how European energy and global food security policies are reshaping rural spaces, expanding agrarian extractivism in sub-Saharan Africa.
By shedding light on how contemporary capital–nature relationships perpetuate socio-ecological crises and colonial models, the book highlights the enduring forms of opposition to these processes. At the heart of these struggles lies a crucial question: how can we understand today’s crises while reclaiming alternative ways of living, producing, and inhabiting the land?
This book traces the origins of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in the broader context of universalism since the beginning of the 20th century.
UHC aims to improve access to essential health services, provide financial protection and overcome health care inequities.
Drawing on rich first-hand data, including expert interviews and archival research, this book adopts a historical-sociological methodology to analyse some of UHC’s key political dynamics: consensus, conflicts, negotiations and struggles. It reveals that UHC is the result of a unique conjoining of movements in health, debates on human rights and concerns with development in a particular world context across the global North and global South.
