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.
In recent years, human rights have played an important role in the increase of geopolitical tensions between China and the EU. In this context, China frequently accuses Western countries of politicizing human rights, an accusation aimed at discrediting criticism of China’s violations for being based on political and economic motives rather than genuine preoccupation for these rights. This chapter engages with the Chinese narrative according to which the EU politicizes human rights. It demonstrates that while the Chinese government assumes that human rights politicization has been detrimental to its interests, Beijing has in fact also benefitted from it. I look at the EU human rights practices in three major issues that frame the China–EU relationship: 1) the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, 2) the Beijing Olympics and 3) Xinjiang. I argue that political and economic considerations have indeed influenced the EU position, but that these practices have in fact sometimes backfired against the EU and diminished the EU’s capacity to promote its vision of human rights.
In October 2015, Xi Jinping’s arrival in the UK was hailed as evidence of a new ‘Golden Era’ of UK–China relations as the UK government sought to establish itself as China’s best friend in Europe. By the end of the decade, the dominant narrative in the UK focused on the challenges and even threats that China posed for not just the UK, but the very nature of the global order itself. In truth, the preferred Golden Era narrative of the Cameron government was not as representative of the wider discourse on China as its political predominance during Cameron’s premiership made it appear, and the shift in the narrative can partly be explained by the change in personnel at the top of the governing Conservative Party. The bipartisan position on China in the US also influenced debates in the UK. Arguably most important, though, were the material changes in the nature of the UK–China economic relationship and changes in China itself, both in terms of Chinese domestic politics and Xi Jinping’s intent to push alternatives to the liberal rules-based international order.
This chapter analyses British media narratives about Chinese synthetic biology, a cutting-edge field of science focused on redesigning living organisms with applications in the development of new medicines or chemicals and in agriculture. Synthetic biology is an area that has acquired great significance in Chinese policy making and attracted attention in global debates about China, not least given its centrality for the strategy for bioeconomy development and considerable public investment it has received. The chapter explores the coverage of Chinese synthetic biology in leading British media outlets, and it identifies three sets of dominant media narratives related to benefits and opportunities, risks and threats, and ethics. The chapter situates these findings in relation to key debates in International Relations and Science and Technology Studies. It shows how the coverage of synthetic biology is bound up with wider debates and controversies surrounding the rise of China and the role of emerging technologies.
Why are particular stories of China told in EU foreign policy? Answers to this question tend to emphasize the EU’s collective identity or strategy and rarely touch on the communities that tell such stories. I argue that if we want to understand EU-level narratives of China, we need to consider the choices storytellers face and how their praxis contributes to EU foreign policy. In this chapter, I explore and compare praxes of narrating China in three distinct communities: the EU studies community, foreign policy think tanks in Brussels and EU-level politics. My analysis rests on comparison of public documents with interviews and fieldwork conducted at different intervals between 2018 and 2024. The analysis shows that the praxis perspective can account for continuity and change in the evolution of EU-level narratives on China and offers insights for improving EU foreign policy.
China is no longer merely a global economic competitor to incumbent powers; it is also perceived to portray itself increasingly as a norm/system setter rather than as a norm/system taker. China’s emerging narratives of the global system have challenged the universalistic post-Cold War narratives of the West. In the West, one response has been the creation of a narrative that the world is developing towards a new bipolar order, similar to the period of the Cold War. The call for economic derisking (or decoupling) from China that is the direct result of its race for technological (and potentially military) leadership over the Western world can be seen as an important outcome of this narrative. At the same time, China is promoting its narrative of a ‘Shared Future for Mankind’. Instead of a competition between two mutually exclusive narratives, the chapter proposes a more flexible and diversified ‘modular home’ approach in which both may exist, made possible by China’s compartmentalizing its foreign policy.
This introductory chapter sets the scene to the experiences of both Spanish host families and arriving Ukrainians by briefly looking at Russia and the Ukraine, and the general global geopolitical spectrum before making a few statements about how this unexpected study came about. Crucial to consider is the historical attachment between the Ukraine and Russia and how the more recent increase in tensions represent Russian concern for Ukraine’s drift towards democratisation and affiliation with the West, thus representing renewed geopolitical rivalry between major world powers. A focus point is how, within this contested relationship, and despite its democratisation, the Ukraine has historically been prone to continued oligarchic control and influence, high levels of corruption and elite crime.
This chapter considers what life was like for the Ukrainians before the invasion, what happened when they started to hear air raid sirens and missiles and bombs striking their cities and see Russian tanks in the streets. There is also a wider consideration of how rapid invasion invited the rapid intervention from Western powers, subsequently backed by powerful arms producers, eager to take advantage of another war for profit motives. The chapter also considers why the Ukrainians decided to leave in early March 2022 – because many conversely stayed – and how they ended up finding me on a hosting website. Their decision to leave the Ukraine is also framed in reports and articles which consider more widely the Ukrainian refugee exodus: where the millions went and how they were received by European countries. Lastly, the chapter introduces some of the Spanish host families and their motives to ‘help’ in the housing and support of the Ukrainians.
Within a year, my town’s time supporting Ukrainians was over: a brief flirtation with what it meant to fully engage in integrating and supporting refugees from a war-torn country. Since then, the council’s exploitative subcontractors found other migrant workers from Morocco to work the land for pittance, the mayor got re-elected and the experience of welcoming the Ukrainians seemed like a distant experience for the townspeople. In this final chapter, an update is provided two years into the conflict on the whereabouts of the Ukrainians who came to Brunete.
Within six months, the solidarity and willingness to help the Ukrainian families had wilted away and the collective support became burdensome for the Spanish host families. Additional resentment had even crept into a few households when two of the women employed in the exploitative manual labour sectors had got additional cash-in-hand jobs and were earning more than the Spanish host family households, thus interfering with the ideological pecking order. Almost all the Ukrainians had left Brunete and there remained only a few Ukrainian families in the town so this chapter looks at their slow exile as well as where some of the Ukrainians went and why. Most families went back to the Ukraine, often returning to the same risky areas from which they had fled. While there seemed to be a few success stories, in the main, the majority of others who went to other European countries simply sidestepped into similar exploitative working conditions even if they reconciled that things could always ‘improve elsewhere’.
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.
