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 of over 1,500 titles.
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 chapter challenges ‘chessboard’ interpretations of infrastructural geopolitics in a realm often assumed to be the sole purview of great powers: nuclear energy. More specifically, it analyses how Namibian actors have employed radioactive strategies – a term used here to refer to the tactics through which actors use the geopolitical significance of nuclear infrastructures to advance their spatial objectives – to pursue their own spatial-political objectives in the context of nuclear geopolitics and uranium mining. It does so across temporalities ranging from German colonialism to apartheid South Africa’s quest for ‘the bomb’ and the Cold War to the war on climate change. The chapter explains how the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), Namibia’s liberation-movement-turned-ruling-party, transformed nuclear infrastructures from symbols of colonial and apartheid exploitation into core components of its quest for state-led extractive development. It begins with an overview of the colonial and apartheid origins of Namibian uranium before embarking on a more detailed analysis of SWAPO’s radioactive strategies during the Cold War, the US-led War on Terror, and, finally, the current moment of US–China rivalry. It concludes with a discussion of how attending to historical and geographic contexts and host country agency can shed new light on infrastructural geopolitics across multiple scales.
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.
This chapter traces the established narrative of infrastructure development in Kyrgyzstan as first dominated by the Soviet Union, followed by the US through international development banks in the 1990s, and most recently by China. It complicates this narrative by diversifying scales of analysis and examining who engages in infrastructure planning and construction, thereby recognizing a multitude of actors and non-linear trajectories development trajectories. Through on-the-ground road ethnography and asphalt archaeology, the authors show the centrality of local politics and perception. They also consider debt and whether it creates dependencies or mutuality.
This chapter argues that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) – which currently controls the Turkish government – is pursuing state spatial objectives that are designed to entrench it within the state apparatus. The cornerstone of its spatial plan is the Middle Corridor, which integrates İstanbul with the Caucasus and Central Asia. This initiative has been formally aligned with the BRI, and this enabled the AKP to pursue its domestic political objectives, which include (1) the cultivation of a supportive bourgeoisie whose fortunes are connected to the construction sector, and (2) institutional reforms that enhance the executive branch’s regulatory powers over economy and society. This arrangement is in jeopardy because most contracts are awarded to Turkish firms, but this has led to tension with Chinese lenders.
This chapter illustrates Vietnam’s political balancing act by examining the country’s state spatial strategies around its infrastructure policy, particularly as Vietnam collaborated with both Japan and China over the past three decades. It suggests that the dynamics of infrastructure finance in Asia are rooted in long histories of regional competition and makes three key contributions. First, studies of international relations have divided security and economy in their research agendas and have thus evolved into two distinct fields of literatures in international security and international political economy. Instead, this chapter makes it clear that the nexus of security and economic policies is an important research agenda. Second, the impact of geopolitical competition between great powers needs to be considered alongside the agency of small states. How Vietnam assesses its respective relations vis-à-vis Japan and China determines how the China–Japan economic statecraft competition plays out. Third, competition creates benefits and challenges for small states in their state spatial strategy crafting. It is increasingly delicate, if not impossible, for the governments of these countries to strike a balance between their developmental priorities and their relations with great power counterparts and domestic constituencies.
