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
The frequent failure of military or armed interventions to protect civilians is well known. This edited collection provides a comprehensive account of a different, effective paradigm: unarmed civilian protection (UCP).
The principles and methods of UCP have been used for many decades to protect both specific, threatened individuals as well as whole communities. Featuring contributions from around the world, this book brings together a wide range of UCP practices in order to examine their underlying theory and interrelated strategies.
The book provides an important illustration of the contributions UCP can make, while also discussing its limitations and failures.
Tensions between the US and China have escalated as both powers seek to draw countries into their respective political and economic orbits by financing and constructing infrastructure.
Wide-ranging and even-handed, this book offers a fresh interpretation of the territorial logic of US-China rivalry, and explores what it means for countries across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. The chapters demonstrate that many countries navigate the global infrastructure boom by articulating novel spatial objectives and implementing political and economic reforms.
By focusing on people and places worldwide, this book broadens perspectives on the US-China rivalry beyond bipolarity, and it is an essential guide to 21st century politics.
Is the European Union (EU) in a state of crisis? Over recent years, a series of systemic and spontaneous challenges, including Brexit, the rise of Euroscepticism and the Eurozone and refugee crises, have manifested in landmark moments for European integration.
First published as a special issue of the journal Global Discourse, this edited collection investigates whether these crises are isolated phenomena or symptoms of a deeper malaise across the EU. Experts from across disciplines analyse and rethink the forces which pull Europeans together, as well as those which push them apart.
Drawing on the words and stories of queer Turkish activists, this book aims to unravel the complexities of queer lives in Turkey. In doing so, it challenges dominant conceptualizations of the queer Turkish experience within critical security discourses.
The book argues that while queer Turks are subjected to ceaseless forms of insecurity in their governance, opportunities for emancipatory resistance have emerged alongside these abuses. It identifies the ways in which the state, the family, Turkish Islam and other socially-mediated processes and agencies can expose or protect queers from violence in the Turkish community.
In this enlightening analysis, Julia Gurol unpicks the complex security relations between the European Union (EU) and China.
She investigates the principles, rationales and shifting dynamics of collaboration on a range of security issues, and their consequences for China, the EU and other regions. She pays particular attention to EU–China relations in the realm of anti-terrorism, anti-piracy and energy security, and disentangles their cooperation efforts in the context of increasing political and economic tensions.
Systematic and accessible, this is an essential guide to the past, present and future of one of the world’s most important, yet most complicated, security relationships.
Known as ‘the land of fire’, Azerbaijan’s politics are materially and ideologically shaped by energy. In the country, energy security emerges as a mix of coercion and control, requiring widespread military and law enforcement deployment.
This book examines the extensive network of security professionals and the wide range of practices that have spread in Azerbaijan’s energy sector. It unpacks the interactions of state, supra‐state, and private security organizations and argues that energy security has enabled and normalized a coercive way of exercising power. This study shows that oppressive energy security practices lead to multiple forms of abuse and poor energy policies.
Using detailed insights from those with first-hand experience of conducting research in areas of international intervention and conflict, this handbook provides essential practical guidance for researchers and students embarking on fieldwork in violent, repressive and closed contexts.
Contributors detail their own experiences from areas including the Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Myanmar, inviting readers into their reflections on mistakes and hard-learned lessons. Divided into sections on issues of control and confusion, security and risk, distance and closeness and sex and sensitivity, they look at how to negotiate complex grey areas and raise important questions that intervention researchers need to consider before, during and after their time on the ground.
The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development makes climate change and responsible consumption key priorities for both industrialized and emerging economies. Moving beyond the Global North, this book uses innovative cross-national and cross-generational research with urban residents in China and Uganda, as well as the UK, to illuminate international debates about building sustainable societies and to examine how different cultures think about past, present and future responsibility for climate change.
The authors explore to what extent different nations see climate change as a domestic issue, whilst looking at local explanatory and blame narratives to consider profound questions of justice between those nations that are more and less responsible for, and vulnerable to, climate change.
