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
Written by a leading expert in the field, this book analyzes the complex relations between the European Union (EU) as a regional organization and the United Nations (UN) as an international, global governance institution.
The book explores how collaboration between the EU and the UN has evolved and how the two entities collaborate both structurally and in day-to-day work. It shows how the EU acts within institutions such as the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and how UN funds and entities, such as UNHRC, UNICEF or UN Women, interact with the EU and its member states.
Through its analysis the book demonstrates how, despite recent criticism, patterns of multilateralism and cooperation between regional and international institutions can be central to stable patterns of rules-based regional and global governance.
This volume analyses the impact of globalization on civil service systems across the Middle East and North Africa.
A collaboration between practitioners and academic public policy experts, it presents an analytical model to assess how globalization influences civil servants, illustrated by case studies of countries where there has been an increased engagement with international actors. It demonstrates how this increased interaction has altered the position of civil servants and traces the shifting patterns of power and accountability between civil servants, politicians and other actors.
It is an original and important addition to debate about globalization’s role in transnational public administration and governance.
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.
International Organizations (IOs) are vital institutions in world politics in which cross-border issues can be discussed and global problems managed.
This path-breaking book shows the efforts that small states have made to participate more fully in IO activities. It draws attention to the challenges created by widened participation in IOs and develops an original model of the dilemmas that both IOs and small states face as the norms of sovereign equality and the right to develop coincide.
Drawing on extensive qualitative data, including more than 80 interviews conducted for this book, the authors find that the strategies which both IOs and small states adopt to balance their respective dilemmas can explain both continuity and change in their interactions with institutions ranging from UN agencies to the World Trade Organization.
In a world that has returned to great power rivalry, understanding the grand strategy of these powers is crucial. This book introduces ten key terms for analysing grand strategy and shows how the world’s great powers – the United States, China, Russia and the European Union (EU) – shape their strategic decisions today.
Outlining the steps needed for a less confrontational grand strategy and a more peaceful and stable world order, this lively and accessible introduction shows how the choices made in each of these ten areas will determine the course of world politics in the first half of the 21st century.
Building on the recent initiative to truly globalize the field of international relations, this book provides an innovative interrogation of regionalism.
The book applies a globalizing framework to the study of regional worlds in order to move beyond the traditional conception of regionalism, which views regions as competing blocs dominated by great powers. Bringing together a wide range of case studies, the book shows that regions are instead dynamic configurations of social and political identities in which a variety of actors, including the less powerful, interact and partake in regionalization processes and have done so through the centuries.
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’.
