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
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 16 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Human Rights x
- Access: All content x
Abolitionist thought visualizes a world without prisons – or a radical reduction or transformation of prisons and punishment. This fascinating book explores the abolitionist ideas of key early socialists and anarchists, writing from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. It considers how these radical thinkers can provide insights into our present condition, both by highlighting the harms of punishment and by pointing to inspiring alternatives to current policy and practice. By examining their calls for the ending of legal coercion, domination and repression, the book shows how the ideas of early socialists and anarchists can assist those engaging in emancipatory struggles against penal and social injustice today.
The European Court of Human Rights depends on the good faith cooperation of its members to implement judgement and maintain legitimacy, but how this translates into compliance varies both across and within states. This book presents an innovative framework for understanding how local cultures dynamically shape states’ ideas about what is and is not legitimate in international human rights regimes.
The book investigates compliance as a product of cultural politics. Case studies from the United Kingdom, Germany and Croatia reveal how states rely on local understanding of human rights and law to deal not only with compliance ‘sticking points’ but also to evaluate the legitimacy of the European human rights system as a whole.
Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe (CoE) after 26 years following the invasion of Ukraine.
This timely and in-depth analysis explores Russia's tumultuous relationship with the CoE/ECHR institutions. It examines Russia’s membership record and the profound impacts of its expulsion for Europe’s human rights system. The authors provide valuable insights for future policy to safeguard the integrity of international human rights institutions.
The book fills an important gap in legal scholarship by exploring the legality and legitimacy of its membership and expulsion, and represents a key reference in understanding the challenge of protecting human rights in the face of rising authoritarianism.
With over five billion internet users globally, it is crucial to understand social media activism and legal change for women and girls.
This insightful book examines the impact of international Twitter (now X) campaigns on domestic laws affecting women and girls. Exploring the complexities of legal change for women and girls across seven countries from Latin America to Middle East and Africa, the book offers empirical insights into the effectiveness of hashtag advocacy and sheds light on the role of social media in shaping different outcomes.
This is a key resource for understanding the dynamics driving social media activism and its potential impact on the rights of women and girls worldwide.
Discussions around digital technologies, new media, platforms and information have long centred on the protection of personal data and privacy. This timely volume extends the conversation to address fundamental societal and structural issues from three perspectives: people, practices and politics.
Organised around an international collection of case studies, the book provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the challenges of privacy in the digital sphere, from emerging regulatory programmes to surveillance capitalism and big tech companies.
Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this is a new and innovative perspective on our datafied societies that goes beyond privacy. It will be a key resource for scholars and students of communication and media studies, and science and technology studies.
This book explores how to establish peace in societies recovering from large-scale, armed conflicts by introducing the sustaining peace scale as a continuous measure for peacebuilding success.
Drawing on an extensive data collection of peacebuilding episodes over almost three decades, the author analyses the impact of four peacebuilding practices - international commitment, power-sharing, security sector reform and transitional justice. Having established the framework, the author applies it to the peacebuilding processes in Sierra Leone and South Africa.
An important contribution to the literature on successful peacebuilding, this book will be essential reading for peacebuilding scholars and practitioners.
Questions as to the mental capacity of an individual to consent to sex are an increasingly important aspect of legal scholarship and professional practice for those working in care. Recent case law has added new layers of complexity, requiring that a person must be able to understand that the other person needs to consent and can withdraw that consent. While this has been welcomed for asserting the importance of the interpersonal dynamics of sex, it has significant implications for practice and for the day-to-day lives of people with cognitive impairments.
This collection brings together academics, practitioners and organisations to consider the challenges posed by the current legal framework, and future directions for law, policy and practice.
Trajectories of Governance studies the complex dynamics of order-making, violence and governance in peripheral cities in Latin America from a comparative, historical, and multi-scalar approach.
This book aims to discover more about the drivers, contexts, and uneven levels of violence through the case studies of Chalatenango and Sonsonate in El Salvador and Pereira and Tunja in Colombia.
Based on a multidisciplinary analytical framework, Trajectories of Governance explains why and how some peripheral cities have become the locus of violent orders, whereas others have managed to control violence, and to examine the role of violence in the workings of local governance.
EPDF and EPUB available open access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
As many developing countries are facing increasingly higher levels of debt and economic instability, this interdisciplinary volume explores the intersection of sovereign debt and women's human rights.
Through contributions from leading voices in academia, civil society, international organisations and nations governments, it shows how debt-related economic policies are widening gender inequalities and argues for a systematic feminist approach to debt issues.
Offering a new perspective on the global debt crisis, this is an invaluable resource for readers who seek to understand the complex relationship between economics and gender.
This thought-provoking collection brings together academics from a range of disciplines to examine modern slavery.
It illustrates how different disciplinary positions, methodologies and perspectives form and clash together through a kaleidoscopic view and forms a unique insight into critical modern slavery studies. Providing a platform to critique the legal, ideological and political responses to the issue, experts interrogate the construct of modern slavery and the anti-trafficking discourse which have dominated contemporary responses to and understandings of exploitation.
Drawing from real-world examples across the world, this is a vital contribution to the study of modern slavery.
