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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Unarmed civilian protection (UCP) is practised across the world by communities and civilians protecting other civilians from direct violence, without the use or threat of weapons. Using nonviolence, strong relationships and proactive presence, they accompany people and create safer spaces for civilians living amid violence. UCP demonstrates that civilians can protect other civilians from violence without the use of weapons, challenging the assumption that armed actors only yield to violence.
In demonstrating that armed actors change their behaviour without the threat of violence, UCP subverts the dominant narratives and paradigms in which protection depends on the strong protecting the weak, and that where there is violence you need soldiers. When we accept that UCP works, there are wider implications for what we know about the capacity of communities, the potential for protection and the breaking of cycles of violence. These insights provide us with new models for how people become safer. Transforming protection by accepting a wider range of approaches and the efficacy of nonviolence will improve the protection of civilians and provide the potential for protection to contribute to a wider transformational change that could reduce the influence of the systems that generate protection threats to civilians.
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 powerful book analyses Britain’s Tory Party’s endemic racism, immigration policies and imposition of austerity, exposing how 14 years of Tory rule have deepened inequality and division.
With vivid examples, from the Windrush scandal and Grenfell tragedy to Islamophobia, Cole reveals how “hostile environment” policies, the “age of austerity” and brutal budget cuts have shaped lives and communities. Combining sharp analysis with historical context, the book uncovers how these issues are deeply tied to capitalism and class struggles.
In the light of the rise of the far right in Britain and offering both immediate solutions and a vision for systemic change, this crucial work challenges us to imagine a fairer, more compassionate society grounded in justice and solidarity.
What role do emerging markets play in the global financial system? Are they subordinated within global financial hierarchies? Or do they have autonomy, even power, to use finance to pursue state objectives?
In this edited volume, leading scholars explore these questions, focusing on state–finance interactions globally. The book combines literatures on international financial subordination, financial statecraft and comparative capitalism to analyse state–finance relationships in emerging markets, particularly the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. It reveals that these states can control their domestic financial sectors despite global subordination, though their ability to do so varies significantly.
This essential volume offers profound insights into how emerging markets are reshaping global finance for scholars and policy makers.
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 evolving relationship between multiculturalism, religion and diversity in Western Europe, proposing a shift towards a post-multicultural approach to address religious and secular pluralism.
The author responds to criticisms of multiculturalism's approach to public religion, including perceived group reification and limited focus on intra-group domination, gender and sexuality equalities. Through a critical dialogue between multicultural theory and political theology, the book offers an original framework for post-multicultural recognition.
Enriching multiculturalism by integrating religious reason and institutional pluralism, this book contributes crucial new insights to debates on religion, equality and diversity in public life.
The gap between personal and formal politics has been widening globally and locally. As personal politics have become more inclusive and egalitarian inspired by new social movements, neoliberal ideologies have undermined democracy, increasing isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental threat. Yet this paradox may also offer a path to transformation.
Using international evidence and examples, The Antidote explores what we can learn from the equalisation of personal roles and relationships that’s been taking place, to help us reconnect with ourselves and each other and make possible more participatory and liberatory policy and politics. It sets out the barriers we face and offers a route map to bring an end to the destructive effects of unfettered neoliberal ideology, economics, policy and politics.
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.
