Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the 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
Youth sector peacebuilding holds the capacity to harness the agency, freedom, and creativity of youth to transform societies marked by violent conflict. This chapter concludes the book with a synopsis of the key positions and perspectives for practitioners to consider, from our analysis and critique of youth sector peacebuilding. The influences of state actors, politicians, funders, and professional priorities are fundamental to the positionality of practitioners and the ensuing practice with young people. This chapter invites the reader to consider the potential energy of politicising action and youth activism and the possibilities inherent in youth participation practices. The omission of the role of young women in peacebuilding throughout this research is of acute concern, prompting greater attention to this undervalued and under-resourced asset. The Hamardle model offers a new language to consider and challenge the dominant hegemonic ideas within youth sector peacebuilding. Ultimately, the reader is urged to view the ideas here with openness rather than scepticism, promoting a reflexive self-appraising stance by the youth sector peacebuilder.
Using Northern Ireland as a compelling case study, this book offers a critique of peacebuilding approaches with young people in contested societies. In the north of Ireland, the spectre of murderous violence is increasingly distant for peace-agreement generations. However, legacies stemming from the 30 years of protracted conflict are ever-present in young people’s segregated lives.
This book presents four distinctive viewpoints that inform contemporary peacebuilding work with young people, revealing divergent purposes and conflicting aspirations. Offering a new model to understand peacebuilding, the authors urge peacebuilding communities around the globe to embrace an increasingly politicising and participative youth peace praxis.
This chapter portrays the four dominant viewpoints that have been generated from our Q methodology study with youth work practitioners. By viewpoint, we mean more than mere opinion. The four viewpoints are indicative of the thought patterns and mental models that practitioners draw upon as they engage in the practice of youth sector peacebuilding. These viewpoints impact on the nature and direction of peacebuilding work with young people. The chapter presents a qualitative description and interpretation of each viewpoint drawing on direct quotations from practitioners as they sorted and discussed their peacebuilding priorities in work with young people. The four distinctive viewpoints on youth sector peacebuilding discussed are: critical thinking and dialogue; mutual understanding; social cohesion and restoration; political engagement and social justice.
This chapter offers a contextual overview and sets the tone for the book. At the outset, the three authors present personal narratives demonstrating their positionality and connectedness to youth sector peacebuilding. These personal accounts illustrate how growing up in a contested society means that no one is without bias. The historical and political backdrop is then examined, endeavouring to explore the dilemmas and tensions inherent within peacebuilding in the context of the north of Ireland. This is followed by an overview and definition of both peacebuilding and youth work. The final section of Chapter 1 outlines the purpose and content of each chapter, offering a guide for readers to explore their specific interests and navigate the book as a whole.
This chapter details the conceptual lens of morphological analysis. Combined with the methodological process of Q methodology, our research led to the development of four new viewpoints on youth sector peacebuilding. Freeden’s morphological analysis is outlined as a way of acknowledging a shared conceptual language of peacebuilding. However, differences in the prioritisation and arrangement of peacebuilding ideas and concepts give rise to different orientations of practice. Using Q methodology, youth work practitioners sorted peacebuilding statements to reveal their perspective on peacebuilding with young people. These statements were developed from an extensive literature review, representing a broad range of peacebuilding concepts and practices. Q methodology helps to group together participants who have sorted statements in such a similar pattern to identify a distinctive shared viewpoint.
This chapter presents the Hamardle model of youth sector peacebuilding constructed from an analysis of four research-informed viewpoints on peacebuilding. Implicit in the four viewpoints are propensities towards either politicisation or harmonisation alongside a primary emphasis on either dialogue or action. The chapter makes these positions explicit with each of the four viewpoints making up a quadrant of the model. The Hamardle model invites students, practitioners, academics, policy makers, and researchers to locate themselves and think critically about their primary dispositions and priorities in the field of youth sector peacebuilding. The internal boundaries of the model blur at the edges indicating how viewpoints are never fixed. For youth work practitioners, unearthing, reflecting upon, and critiquing individual and collective dispositions is a liberating process that enables biases to be named and new possibilities to be explored.
As young people are so often exposed to or involved in violence within conflicts, their essential role in building peace may well be anticipated; however, this is rarely realised in a substantive way. Having voice and holding power are central tenets of such participatory processes. The ideas presented in this chapter challenge the misrepresentation of youth as lethargic, disinterested, and disengaged from political thinking and action. For young people to be enabled in this way, democratic philosophy and practices need to co-exist and converge. The role and position of practitioners, policy makers, influencers, and young people is central to growing a politicised peacebuilding ecosystem. The chapter explores models and stories of youth participation to crystallise what makes a radical and authentic form of youth activism in peacebuilding. We propose that developing an inclusive peacebuilding approach necessitates the understanding and practice of youth participation. This chapter compels the reader to consider the foundations of youth activism in peacebuilding.
This chapter presents a contemporary typology of peacebuilding approaches that practitioners variously draw upon. The typology, developed from an extensive review of literature, covers six overarching themes of reconciliation; intergroup contact; human rights; justice; citizenship; and wellbeing. Each theme is examined in depth, exploring tensions, debates, dilemmas, and critiques of these concepts in the field of peacebuilding. A key fault line is propensities towards instilling harmonious interpersonal relationships versus commitments towards a democratic, dialogical, and potentially agitational politics. The typology has a focus on the work practised within the Northern Ireland context, with many applications to peacebuilders in contested societies around the globe. Familiarity with these concepts and the different trajectories of practice across these domains give rise to important discussion and context for the morphological analysis found in Chapter 6.
This chapter introduces two ‘theories of practice’ that invite an analysis of the political, social, and cultural contexts which shape youth sector peacebuilding. Drawing on Lave and Wenger’s work, youth sector peacebuilding is situated as constellations of communities of practice across the globe. Practitioner communities of practice interface with policy communities of practice. Regimes of competence that delineate legitimate practice are inscribed and renewed in interactions between ‘old-timers’ and ‘newcomers’ to peacebuilding. The assumptions around which peacebuilders gather and the ensuing power struggles are explored. Subsequently, Bourdieu’s ideas frame an analysis of power relations in youth sector peacebuilding. This critique presents ideas and approaches of youth sector peacebuilding as an outworking of the economic, social, and cultural power of the state. These lenses offer a critique and analysis of the current state of play and the future hopes for peacebuilding.
This chapter mounts a critique of youth work and peacebuilding within a neoliberal policy and practice landscape. Inclinations towards quick fixes and ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches are identified that result in decontextualised and depoliticised practices, at odds with youth work as an empowering and participatory practice. An enduring tension between social control and social change is discussed with reference to multiple models of youth work from different international contexts. Drawing on literature from critical peace studies, similar dynamics are observed with pressure for a ‘local turn’ in liberal peacebuilding where top-down approaches are replaced with notions of locally owned and community-driven peace processes. The chapter outlines how youth sector peacebuilding is doubly subjected to these limitations. Homing in on the north of Ireland as an illustrative case, iterations of local policy and its impact upon youth sector peacebuilding in the region are examined. This analysis critiques an absence of creative involvement and participation of young people in devising locally owned, nationally significant peacebuilding strategies and democratic processes.
