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
This book documents the intimate lives of Ukrainians as they fled their homeland in search of a safe and stable place to stay. The critical memoirs follow the lives of 16 Ukrainian families in a small Spanish town near Madrid and the local families that volunteered to host them during a time of limited state support and clear EU plan for the refugees.
Through first-hand testimonies, social media messages and photographs, the book reveals the scarring realities of the Ukrainians’ upheaval, displacement and trauma alongside the well-meaning sacrifices made by the host families which quickly mutate into moralistic and meritocratic expectations of their new guests.
In doing so, the book offers a vivid portrayal of how the tensions of war and displacement play out in real life in real time.
Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe (CoE) after 26 years following the invasion of Ukraine.
This timely and in-depth analysis explores Russia's tumultuous relationship with the CoE/ECHR institutions. It examines Russia’s membership record and the profound impacts of its expulsion for Europe’s human rights system. The authors provide valuable insights for future policy to safeguard the integrity of international human rights institutions.
The book fills an important gap in legal scholarship by exploring the legality and legitimacy of its membership and expulsion, and represents a key reference in understanding the challenge of protecting human rights in the face of rising authoritarianism.
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.
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.
The last decade or so has seen US-China relations enter a negative spiral. The evolution of this complex relationship has triggered a fast-growing debate on whether this is a New Cold War.
Building on a deconstruction of concepts such as cold wars and Cold War, this book illustrates how the relationship between the US and China has been a “marriage of convenience” - with both cooperation and competition - for years, but also that we might be close to the end of it. The US and China, it is argued, are locked in a “new type of cold war” where mechanisms of deterrence and competition differ compared to those of the Cold War, and which makes the return of bloc politics possible.
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.
Though children have never been absent from international studies discourse, they are too often reduced to a few simplistic and unidimensional framings. This book seeks to recover children’s agency and to recognise the complex variety of childhoods and the global issues that affect them. Written by an international list of contributors from Europe, Africa, North America and Australasia, chapters present highly nuanced accounts of children and childhoods across global political time and space split into three broad sections: imagined childhoods, governed childhoods and lived childhoods.
Through its analysis, the book demonstrates how IR is, somewhat paradoxically, quite deeply invested in a particular rendering of childhood as, primarily, a time of innocence, vulnerability and incapacity.
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.
During the second half of the 20th century, Colombia suffered extreme levels of political violence. This book explores the involvement of the international community in peacebuilding efforts in Colombia since 2016. In particular, it examines how the interventions were framed in order to promote and sustain their involvement and questions whether these frames reflected the true reality within Colombia.
The book focuses on key donors, including US, the EU, Canada, Sweden and the UK, as well as multinational actors, such as the UN and the World Bank, to demonstrate how their framing of local issues for international consumption can have real world implications for peacebuilding efforts on the ground.
