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 1500 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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- International Development x
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Freedom of religion and belief is crucial to any sustainable development process, yet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) pay little attention to religious inequalities.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of how efforts to achieve SDGs can be enhanced by paying greater attention to freedom of religion and belief. In particular, it illustrates how poverty is often a direct result of religious prejudice and how religious identity can shape a person’s job prospects, their children’s education and the quality of public services they receive. Drawing on evidence from Asia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, the book foregrounds the lived experiences of marginalized communities as well as researchers and action organizations.
The 2017 persecution of the Rohingyas resulted in around a million Rohingyas fleeing to Bangladesh, India and Malaysia.
This book investigates the complex challenges of managing the large-scale refugee exodus in Bangladesh and how best to resolve these challenges in the future. Using a mixed method approach that includes a survey, key informant interviews and numerous short case studies of persecution, the authors also examine the problematic influence of the media, as local depictions of Rohingya refugees often caused further tension and divides in the midst of the refugee crisis. The book’s analysis offers a deeper understanding of the causes and drivers of identity-based politics among Myanmar’s Rohingya.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Examining countries where religious pluralism is in decline, including Iraq, India, Pakistan and Nigeria, this book brings together reflections, knowledge and learning about the daily experiences of religious minorities, generated using participatory research methods. It also showcases the participatory methodologies implemented by its international team of contributors and highlights the importance of using non-extractive methods for engaging with participants.
Including a careful consideration of the ethics and limitations of participatory research with persecuted groups, the book reflects on the implications for people’s agency when research creates space for them to reflect on their realities in a group setting and uses methods which put their own experience and analysis at the centre of the process.
During the second half of the 20th century, Colombia suffered extreme levels of political violence. This book explores the involvement of the international community in peacebuilding efforts in Colombia since 2016. In particular, it examines how the interventions were framed in order to promote and sustain their involvement and questions whether these frames reflected the true reality within Colombia.
The book focuses on key donors, including US, the EU, Canada, Sweden and the UK, as well as multinational actors, such as the UN and the World Bank, to demonstrate how their framing of local issues for international consumption can have real world implications for peacebuilding efforts on the ground.
Much of the debate on the future of work has focused on responses to technological trends in the Global North, with little evidence on how these trends are impacting on work and workers in the Global South.
Drawing on a rich selection of ethnographic studies of precarious work in Africa, this innovative book discusses how globalisation and digitalisation are drivers for structural change and examines their implications for labour. Bringing together global labour studies and inequality studies, it explores the role of digital technology in new business models, and ways in which digitalization can be harnessed for counter mobilisation by the new worker.
What part do the values of growth and prosperity, freedom and justice, security and democracy play in social policy and human welfare? How can we judge the policies offered to us as the recipe for progress?
At a time of global ‘permacrisis’, Sebastian Taylor applies his extensive frontline experience working with health systems and healthcare in the Global North and South to assess the concrete impact of contemporary liberal values on our welfare, development and environmental survival.
Drawing on research from around the world, he uses health as an objective metric to assess how effective these policies are for individuals and society as a whole.
Bringing together the perspectives of researchers, policy makers, activists, educators and practitioners, this book critically interrogates the Western-centric assumptions underpinning education and development agendas and the colonial legacies of violence they often uphold.
The book considers the crucial connection between the idea of sustainable futures and the demand to decolonise education. Containing an innovative mixture of text, stories and poetry, it explores how decolonised futures can be conceived and enacted, offering theoretical and practical examples, including from practice in educational and cultural organisations. In doing so, the book highlights education’s potential role in facilitating processes of reparative justice that can contribute to decolonised futures.
The frequent failure of military or armed interventions to protect civilians is well known. This edited collection provides a comprehensive account of a different, effective paradigm: unarmed civilian protection (UCP).
The principles and methods of UCP have been used for many decades to protect both specific, threatened individuals as well as whole communities. Featuring contributions from around the world, this book brings together a wide range of UCP practices in order to examine their underlying theory and interrelated strategies.
The book provides an important illustration of the contributions UCP can make, while also discussing its limitations and failures.
Focusing on the flight of women and girls from Venezuela, this book examines the gendered nature of forced displacement and the ways in which the failures of protection regimes to be sensitive to displacement’s gendered character affect women and girls, and their sexual and reproductive health.
Highlighting how categorical legal distinctions between ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’ fail to capture the dynamics of forced migration in Latin America, it investigates how the operation of this categorical divide generates responsibility and protection gaps in relation to female forced migrants which act as determinants of sexual and reproductive health. Drawing on the voices of displaced women, it argues that a robust political ethics of protection of the forcibly displaced must encompass all necessary fleers and be responsive to the gendered character of forced displacement and particularly to effective access to sexual and reproductive health rights.
Poverty in India is intimately connected with caste, untouchability, colonialism and indentured servitude, inseparable from the international experience of slavery and race.
Focusing on historical and modern practices, this book goes beyond traditional economic approaches to poverty and demonstrates its genesis in exclusion, isolation, domination and extraction resulting in the removal of human and economic rights. Examining cash and assets transfers and enhancement of women’s rights, primary health and education, it scrutinizes inadequacies in compensatory policies for redressing the balance.
This is an original interdisciplinary contribution that offers bold domestic and international policies anchored in human radicalism to eradicate poverty.
