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.
Focusing on inward foreign direct investment (FDI) screening, this book provides an in-depth analysis of how European states’ economic interactions with China have become a security issue.
Based on 100 interviews with scholars, journalists, policy makers, and politicians from across Europe, the book underscores the importance of the policy making process that led to the adoption of investment screening in European nations. It adopts the theory of securitization to analyse the passage of the status of Chinese FDI from economy to security. In doing so, it shows how the shifting view of Europeans is attributed to changes such as China’s growing economic presence, the persistence of non-market practices, the loss of competitiveness, and the use of economic statecraft.
In this book, a former US Department of State senior arms control official critically analyses two pivotal nuclear arms control treaties: the established Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the rising Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
The book offers a concise and critical analysis of the two, illuminating both their strengths and shortcomings. The author acknowledges the idealistic goal of the TPNW but argues that its immediate abolitionist stance lacks a roadmap for achievement. Instead, the book advocates realistic progress within the NPT framework. It provides twelve key negotiation topics for fostering meaningful dialogue among nuclear-weapon states, while emphasizing the urgency of concrete action in a world facing growing nuclear threats.
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.
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.
In recent years, security actors have become increasingly concerned with health issues. This book reveals how understandings of race, sexuality and gender are produced/reproduced through healthcare policy.
Analysing the plasma of paid Mexicana/o donors in the US, airport vomit in Ebola epidemics, and the semen of soldiers with genitourinary injuries, this book shows how security practices focus upon governing bodily fluids.
Using a variety of critical scholarship – feminist technoscience, queer studies and critical race studies – this book uses fluids to reveal unequal distributions of life and death.
Over the last two decades, China has emerged as one of the most powerful state actors in the post-Cold War international system.
This book provides a multifaceted and spatially oriented analysis of how China’s re-emergence as a global power impacts the dominance of the United States as well as domestic state and non-state actors in various world-regions, including the Asia-Pacific, Africa, South America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe and the Arctic. Chapters reflect on how and under which conditions competition (and cooperation) between the United States and China vary across these regions and what such variations mean for the prospects of war and peace, universal human dignity and global cooperation.
Within International Relations scholarship, the nature of international organizations and their relationship with each other and nation-states has been widely contested. This edited volume brings together a team of experts to shed new light on inter-organizational relations in world politics.
The book covers areas from the rule of law and international security to business and sport. Through its analysis, it demonstrates that, just as inter-organizations relations themselves are diverse and complex, research on this topic should also be pluralistic in order to draw new and valuable results and insights.
