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.
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
Felix Anderl’s book is a stimulating analysis of the decline of the social movement against the World Bank and the rise of a new form of transnational rule.
Reflecting on the transnational mobilizations of the 1990s, the book examines activists’ struggles to sustain their momentum since then. It shows how the opening up of world economic institutions contributed to complex rule in global governance, creating access for some while weakening their critique and fragmenting the overall social movement.
The book bridges International Relations and Social Movement Studies to observe international organizations and social movements in their interaction, demonstrating how social movements are divided and ruled in the absence of a ruler.
This collection brings together leading figures in the study of international relations to explore praxis as a perspective on international politics and law. With its focus on competent judgments, the praxis approach holds the promise to overcome the divide between knowing and acting that marks positivist international relations theory.
Building on the transdisciplinary work of Friedrich Kratochwil – and with a concluding chapter from him – this book reveals the scope, limits and blind spots of praxis theorizing.
For anyone involved in international politics, this is an important contribution to the reconciliation of theory and practice and an inspiration for future research.
Analysing social change has too often been characterized by parochialism, either a Eurocentrism that projects European experience outwards or a disciplinary narrowness that ignores insights from other academic disciplines. This book moves beyond these limits to develop a global perspective on social change.
The book provincializes Europe in order to analyse European modernity as the product of global developments and brings together renowned scholars from international relations, history and sociology in the search for common understandings. In so doing, it provides a range of promising theoretical approaches, analytical takes and substantive research areas that offer new vistas for understanding change on a global scale.
The idea of civilization recurs frequently in reflections on international politics. However, International Relations academic writings on civilization have failed to acknowledge the major 20th-century analysis that examined the processes through which Europeans came to regard themselves as uniquely civilized – Norbert Elias’s On the Process of Civilization.
This book provides a comprehensive exploration of the significance of Elias’s reflections on civilization for International Relations. It explains the working principles of an Eliasian, or process-sociological, approach to civilization and the global order and demonstrates how the interdependencies between state-formation, colonialism and an emergent international society shaped the European ‘civilizing process’.