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 of over 1,500 titles.
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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- Type: Book x
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In 2003, the UN adopted a zero-tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers and aid workers. The policy arrived amid a series of scandals revealing sexual misconduct perpetrated against the very people peacekeeping and humanitarian missions were meant to protect.
This edited collection, including contributions from academics and practitioners, highlights the challenges of preventing and responding to abuse in peacekeeping and aid work, and the unintended consequences of current approaches. It lays bare the structures of power, coloniality and racism that underpin abuse and hinder accountability while charting a path for future action.
This eye-opening book will appeal to academics and students of the politics and practice of peacekeeping and humanitarianism, and to practitioners, policy makers and those working within the field.
Focusing on Ghana, the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from European colonial rule and the first in the world to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this book explores how dominant children’s rights principles interact with the lived realities of a range of children’s lives.
The author considers the changeability and inconsistencies of childhoods within this context and the factors that underpin these varied intersections, including cultural norms, British colonial legacy, the influence of Christianity, urbanization, and social, economic and political transformations.
Challenging one-dimensional portrayals of childhoods in the Global South, the author highlights the need for more holistic approaches to the study of children’s lives and children’s rights realization in Southern contexts.
Africa’s unique position as an international diplomatic actor has not always been given the attention it deserves. This volume bridges this gap by offering a fresh, comprehensive and realistic overview of African diplomacy.
The book examines African diplomatic practice. Chapters explore how different types of diplomacy have developed over time, including energy diplomacy, economic diplomacy and quiet diplomacy. Crucially, the book assesses how certain events have allowed Africa to use certain types of diplomacy to yield better outcomes for itself.
Including contributions from an international team of scholars, policy makers and experts from the diplomatic world, the book provides a comprehensive guide to African diplomacy and challenges the current dominant usage of Northern perspectives on diplomacy studies.
This book is the first to provide an introductory overview to the concept of ‘urban informality’, taking an international perspective across the global North and South. It explores theoretical understandings of the term, and looks at how it affects ways of living, such as land use, housing and basic services, working lives and politics.
Using a broad range of material to bring the topic to life, including non-conventional sources – such as fiction, poetry, photography, interviews and other media – the book helps students, practitioners and scholars develop learning and research on this topic. The book also includes interjections from diverse voices of practitioners, community activists and regional experts.
Drawing on international case studies from emerging economies and developing countries including South Africa, India, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, Indonesia, China and Russia, this book examines the rise, nature and effectiveness of recent developments in social policy in the Global South.
By analysing these new emerging trends, the book aims to understand how they can contribute to meaningful change and whether they could offer alternative solutions to the social, economic and environmental policy challenges facing low-income countries within a contemporary global context.
It pays particular attention to reforms and innovations relating to the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including the move away from a welfare state, towards a ‘welfare multitude’, in which new actors, such as civil society organisations, play an increasingly important role in social policy.
This book centres on women living with HIV in South Africa who have navigated affective relationships, activist networks, government institutions and global coalitions to transform health policies that govern access to HIV medicines. Drawing on 20 years of ethnographic and policy research in South Africa, Brazil and India, it highlights the value of understanding the embodied and political dimensions of health policy and reveals the networked threads that weave women’s precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance. It illuminates the entwined histories of health policy evolution, systemic inequality and everyday life and calls for a recognition of the embodied ramifications of democratic politics and global health governance.
By integrating medical anthropology with science studies and political theory, this book traces the history of the struggle to access HIV medicines in the Global South and brings it into the present by articulating the lessons learned by activists and policy makers engaged in shaping these vital health policies.
This short book aims to provide a decolonial critique of dominant global agendas concerning teacher professionalism and to propose new understanding based on the perspectives and experiences of a sample of teachers in Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Rwanda and Tanzania. The book opens by setting out dominant conceptions of teacher professionalism as they appear in the global literature. It then uses Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s three dimensions of coloniality (namely, the coloniality of power, of knowledge and of being) as a framework for considering the legacy of colonialism on teacher professionalism and setting out teachers’ ideas concerning the barriers to and affordances of their professionalism. The main arguments advanced in the book are that a decolonial lens is helpful for contextualizing the perspectives of teachers in the global South; the lived experiences and material conditions of these teachers are often neglected in dominant discourses; it is important to situate the perspectives of teachers in an understanding of local contexts and realities; and, in contrast to deficit discourses that predominate in the global literature, there is much that can be learned about teacher professionalism from teachers in the global South.
Only 15 kilometres away from the border of Zimbabwe, Musina is an obscure town in South Africa that the media cast into the public eye in the wake of the 2008 Zimbabwean economic crisis.
Taking as its starting point the arrival of thousands of displaced Zimbabwean migrants at Musina, this book presents valuable new perspectives on the temporality of migration and the governance of immobilities. The author explores the role of humanitarian actors in supporting migrants, and examines the outcomes of government-led activities in the longer term.
This is an insightful assessment of how state and non-state practices intertwine in the management of largely immobile people, and of the importance of time in understanding African migration and borders.
Rooted in an international political economy theoretical framework, this book provides unique insights into the global forces and local responses that are shaping education systems in Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC).
The book covers all Spanish-speaking countries of the CALC region and examines the effects of macro-economic pressures, geopolitical intervention, neo-colonial relationships, global pandemics, transnational gang networks, and the influence of international organizations. Chapters analyse the challenges and opportunities these global forces present to education systems in the region as well as highlighting the local efforts to address, mitigate, and counteract them. In doing so, the book illuminates how education can contribute to either maintaining or challenging inequalities and exclusion in the face of pressures from the global to local levels.
This book combines assemblage theory and policy mobilities to inform the study of comparative and international education (CIE), focusing on education policy and how such policy moves are enacted.
These approaches challenge taken-for-granted and universalizing concepts in policy research and policy work in CIE such as the nation-state, policy making/policy enactment, global/local, Global North/Global South and highlight how policy is contingent on emerging through complex relations between people and places.
Using illustrative cases and vignettes drawn from research and practice in CIE and education development, the book demonstrates how these ideas can be used in the analysis of policy and the application of this approach in real life.
