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
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 37 items for :
- Type: Book x
- International Relations Theory x
- Access: All content x
Comparative practices are integral to global security politics. The balance of power politics, status competitions and global security governance would be possible without them. Yet, they are rarely treated as the main object of study.
Exploring the varied uses of comparisons, this book addresses three key questions:
• How is comparative knowledge produced?
• How does it become politically relevant?
• How do comparative practices shape security politics?
This book makes a bold, new step in uniting disparate streams of research to show how comparative practices order governance processes and modulate competitive dynamics in world politics.
Over recent decades, LGBTQ people have successfully fought for civil and reproductive rights across Western states, including the right to marry, have children and serve openly as public servants and in the armed forces. Internationally, states have started to use their stance on homonormativity to position themselves as progressive.
This book provides new insights into the role played by race, sexuality, and gender by analysing contemporary constructions of Swedishness through LGBTQ rights by using three specific case studies:
-
A ‘pride parade’ organised by the Swedish populist right
-
Swedish Armed Forces’ marketing material
-
A social media account by and for racialised LGBTQ people.
Liberal political science misconceives socialist autocracy in China as the opposite, reinforcing its incapacity to explain the worldwide democratic recession in the 21st century and the failure of any democracy to recover. A fatal flaw of liberal scholarship lies in the conceptualization of politics as influencing the choices of independent individuals in aggregate. Practical consequences include a desire to avoid or convert allegedly illiberal systems according to a self-image of being participatory. Confucianism instead provides a governmentality clue to how all human gatherings evolve upon leadership struggling to balance dominance and belonging. Through Confucian enlightenment, leaders are convinced that all bad autocrats fall. So, leadership cannot survive without the willing following of the population. A derivative, tightly in line with the thrust of socialism, is that the population must be well-fed and protected. Such a relational lens considers people in their entirety while, epistemologically, desensitizing individual differences. However, political science tends to consult individual preferences, with the ironic consequence of a leadership losing sight of the entirety. A political science reconfigured through Confucianism reveals the false binary of democracy versus autocracy. It interrogates how leadership everywhere rebalances dominance and belonging to restore its relational sensibilities.
Bringing together a team of international scholars, this volume provides a foundational guide to queer methodologies in the study of political violence and conflict.
Contributors provide illuminating discussions on why queer approaches are important, what they entail and how to utilise a queer approach to political violence and conflict. The chapters explore a variety of methodological approaches, including fieldwork, interviews, cultural analysis and archival research. They also engage with broader academic debates, such as how to work with research partners in an ethical manner.
Including valuable case studies from around the world, the book demonstrates how these methods can be used in practice. It is the first critical, in-depth discussion on queer methods and methodologies for research on political violence and conflict.
Why do international actors, including powerful states, often fail to develop clear foreign policies and instead adopt indecisive, ‘muddling-through’ approaches?
This book develops a concept and a theory of reluctance in world politics. Applying it to the study of regional crisis management by leading powers, it finds that reluctance emerges when governments fail to devise clear foreign policy preferences and face competing international pressures.
The study of reluctance in world politics sheds new light on some of the most pressing problems of our time, from weak crisis management to cooperation deficits in global governance.
This book explores the relationship between the state and war within the context of seismic technological change.
As we experience a fourth industrial revolution, technology already exerts a huge impact on the character of war and military strategies in the form of drones and other types of ‘remote’ warfare. However, technological developments are not confined to the defence sector, and the diffusion of military technology inevitably also affects the wider economy and society.
This book investigates these possible developments and speculates on their ramifications for the future. Through its analysis, the book questions what will happen to war and the state and whether we will reach a point where war leads to the unmaking of the state itself.
This book examines Japan’s relationship with Myanmar from the passage of its constitution in May 2008 to the February 2021 coup d’état that finished its transition to a ‘disciplined democracy.’
It explores the nexus between security and political economy in the context of changing regional dynamics characterized by ‘Great Power’ competition and cooperation. Focusing on the impact of Japan’s relations with Myanmar on people in Myanmar and beyond, the author argues that the Japanese government and businesses side lined ‘universal values’ for profit at the expense of human security.
This text develops a unique Area Studies approach that critiques how Japan’s foreign policy elites perceive Japan’s role in the liberal international order.
Bringing together eminent International Relations (IR) scholars from China and the West, this book examines moral realism from a range of different perspectives. Through its analyses, it verifies the robustness of moral realism in IR theory.
The first section of the book is written by Chinese scholars and dedicated to debates about how moral realism relates to traditional schools of IR theory. The latter portion, provided by Western contributors, critically investigates both the universal and practical values of moral realism. Finally, Yan Xuetong concludes by responding constructively to all criticisms and further exploring the nature and characteristics of interstate leadership in moral realism.
China’s vision for international order is a matter of great global interest. This book analyses China’s vision for foreign policy and how it is seeking to achieve its goals with its immediate neighbours.
The book provides a historically informed account by examining the legacy of China’s imperial past and traditional political philosophy for insights on the country’s view of its place in today’s world. It argues that China today sees the maintenance of order as its own responsibility and that it believes this order needs to attribute different positions and roles to ‘small’ and ‘big’ states to achieve stability. Furthermore, it explores the different tools which China employs to achieve its vision, including a proactive diplomacy, the control of international discourse, threat of punishment for ‘misbehaviour’ and the promise of economic benefits in return for compliance.
This book reviews the formative years of the United Nations (UN) under its first Secretary-General Trygve Lie.
This welcome appraisal shows how the foundations for an expanded secretary-general role were laid during this period, and that Lie’s contribution was greater than has later been acknowledged. The interplay of crisis decision-making, institutional constraints and the individuals involved thus built the foundations for the UN organization we know today.
Addressing important wider questions of IGO creation, governance and autonomy, this is an incisive account of how the UN moved from paper to practice under Lie.
