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
Inequality is an ever-present danger in our society. This important book addresses the crucial nexus between the lived experience of inequality and how it shapes political responses.
With contributors from the UK and Continental Europe, the book compiles case studies with theoretically informed discussions of the relationship between affective polarisation, social inequality and the fall-out from Brexit and COVID-19. Using a broad concept of social inequality, the book incorporates aspects of economy and society, language and emotion culture as well as interviews and film in historical and transnational perspective.
The contributors offer a powerful examination of the ways in which the politics of the UK and the lived experiences of its residents have been reframed in the first decades of the 21st century.
The world has changed dramatically since the emergence of post-Marxism, and a reassessment is needed to determine its significance in the modern world.
First published as a special issue of Global Discourse, this book explores the theoretical position of post-Marxism and investigates its significance in recent, global political developments such as Brexit, Trump and the rise of the far right. With valuable insights from international contributors across a range of disciplines, the book puts forward a strong case for the continuing relevance of post-Marxism and particularly for Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy.
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.
Austerity is not always one-size-fits-all; it can be a flexible, class-based strategy taking several forms depending on the political-economic forces and institutional characteristics present.
This important book identifies continuity and variety in crisis-driven austerity restructuring across Canada, Denmark, Ireland and Spain. In their analysis, the authors focus on several components of austerity, including fiscal and monetary policy, budget narratives, public sector reform, labor market flexibilization, and resistance. In so doing, they uncover how austerity can be categorized into different dynamic types, and expose the economic, social, and political implications of the varieties of austerity.
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’.
