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
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 concluding chapter summarizes and discusses the answers that the preceding chapters give to the three questions guiding the volume. Taken together, the chapters show that traditional security issues and newer ones are, for all their differences, not so dissimilar in the production of comparative knowledge, the dynamics through which it gains political relevance and the effects that comparative practices have on global security politics. The chapter particularly highlights the ambiguity of the comparative knowledge that underpins and shapes global security politics. Bringing the so far disparate research on arms dynamics, balance of power politics, status competition and knowledge production on governance objects into a common dialogue thus provides International Relations with a deeper understanding not only of the ubiquity of comparative practices but also of their fundamental role in the ordering of global security politics – and, in fact, world politics more broadly.
Tapping into international relations status’ research’s extended lineage, this chapter makes the case for a thick constructivist account of international status dynamics that makes the construction of rules and comparisons central to analysis. Drawing upon the work of Robert Gilpin and Nicholas Onuf, the chapter’s approach enables the exploration of how the rules governing status competitions emerge, why some rules become agreed upon and others contested, and the consequences of these processes of rule formation. While this framework requires a gestalt switch for conventional status research, this chapter argues that it is possible to do so while remaining consistent with status research’s core definition of status. The value of the framework is illustrated via a case study of how the rules of the nuclear status competition emerged and solidified over the course of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the Soviet Union and United States (1969–79).
This chapter studies the production of comparative knowledge on matters of cybersecurity. Drawing on ecosystem approaches, it identifies three clusters of actors that produce such comparative knowledge: one tracking the evolving patterns of cyber threats, a second one evaluating the cybersecurity capacities of states and a third one assessing the cyber power of states. The three clusters differ in terms of prevalent actors and in terms of their logics of comparison. The chapter argues that two characteristics of the cyberspace ecosystem help to explain these differences: The first characteristic is the unequal distribution of relevant resources, with cybersecurity companies dominating the first cluster thanks to their expansive networks of digital sensors. The second characteristic is the political struggles over internet governance as well as the geopolitical tensions underpinning them, which effectively preclude international organizations from positioning themselves in the second and third cluster, leaving them to non-state actors. For all their differences, though, the three clusters sustain a common narrative of a constantly evolving landscape of threats, which substantiates the framing of cybersecurity as a pressing problem that demands ongoing political action.
This chapter zooms in on a key element of the epistemic infrastructure that produces and publishes comparative knowledge on military capabilities: the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and The Military Balance that it issues annually. Written as an insider account of the comparative practices, the chapter sheds light on the methodological questions underpinning the calculation of military expenditures, the counting of weapon systems and assessments of their quality. It furthermore shows how the comparative practices have become more sophisticated over time, with the IISS notably complementing the printed The Military Balance with a digital database named the Military Balance Plus. The chapter ends by reflecting on the drivers of the changes in the comparative practices, highlighting besides technological developments in weapon systems and geopolitical changes also the possibilities that new technologies offer for developing more sophisticated tools for comparison such as the mentioned digital database.
This chapter studies the role of comparative practices in the context of arms control, using as an example the negotiations on the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) which helped to end the East–West conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Comparisons can be used for different kinds of assessments. The CFE negotiations underscore that arms control negotiations intertwine two types – performance assessments and distribution assessments – which are crucial to the management of balance of power politics. The stabilization of military balances cannot be managed without a comparative framework for evaluating and regulating the distribution of military capabilities. Given the distributional implications, the development of such a shared comparative framework involves a complex wrangling over principles, goals, definitions, counting rules and limits, as the CFE negotiations illustrate. At the same time, they demonstrate that comparisons are not always generative of competition. They can also be instrumental in ending competition and managing the transition towards more stable relations for a certain period of time. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how the CFE Treaty ultimately failed to stabilize the post-Cold War era.
From the genesis of the ‘state failure’ discourse in the 1990s, to its instantiation in policies and programmes of major multilateral actors, the concept of ‘failure/fragility’ has become an accepted way to frame interventionary policies and practices. This chapter traces its evolution, focusing on how different organizations and actors have shaped the concept to their interests and orientations, ranging from the Fund for Peace’s ‘Fragile States Index’ to OECD and World Bank reports. The interaction of academic knowledge creation with multilateral security and development policies highlights how certain forms of comparative knowledge have been privileged in this field of global public policy and practice. The implications of fragility indicators for security governance and development policies in the Global South have been profound.
This introductory chapter presents the theme of the volume: the use and effects of comparisons in global security politics. It shows that several streams of research – notably on arms races and arms control, balance of power politics, status competition and knowledge production on security problems – touch upon the crucial role that comparative practices play in the constitution and ordering of global security politics. Yet, these streams of research rarely engage in a common debate on comparative practices, probably because some of them adhere to a realist epistemology in which comparisons are mere mapping tools whereas others, following a constructivist epistemology, conceive of them as ordering tools. The chapter argues that a common debate is nonetheless possible and worthwhile, and proposes to organize this common debate around three guiding questions: How is comparative knowledge produced? How does comparative knowledge become politically relevant? How do comparative practices shape security politics?
