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.
The received wisdom across International Relations and International Law presents legitimacy as one of several possible explanations for compliance, alongside coercion, self-interest, institutional or public pressure, and normative argumentation; these concepts each form the basis of one of the competing approaches to compliance offered by realist-positivist, rationalist, domestic institutionalist, and constructivist and norm-oriented schools of International Relations and International Legal theory. This chapter challenges that separation, revisiting each of the explanations for compliance to show that assumptions about legitimacy run through all of them, albeit often implicitly. The chapter argues that these explanations undervalue the local cultural and historical contexts in which notions of what counts as legitimate or not are constructed, contested, and translated into decisions to comply with some laws but not others, and advocates for a more culturally sensitive approach to legitimacy and compliance.
The concluding chapter considers the broader implications domestic cultural politics of human rights and legitimacy might have on relations between supranational legal institutions and their member states, and on the future of the European human rights order. It highlights the significant influence local cultural politics have over the relationships between domestic actors and the ECtHR, although the particular roles domestic ideas play in ‘pushing’ states towards compliance – and how these interact with other normative forces at the European and international level – vary considerably across the United Kingdom, Germany, and Croatia. The chapter also discusses which types of ECtHR cases and human rights norms states are more likely to comply with or resist, based on the role of their rights cultures and perceptions of legitimacy, and draws some conclusions about how these variations can be theorized more broadly.
This chapter shows that cultural politics of human rights in Croatia are structured by European-facing narratives stressing the importance of liberal democratic conceptions of human rights on the one hand, and on the other by inward-facing political discussion and compliance practices. These inward-facing politics and practices are more emblematic of contestation across and within different conceptions of Croatian nationalism and post-independence memory politics which do not always align with European expectations, as well as lingering socialist-era traditions of judicial formalism that foster reluctance to contribute to public debates about the place of local or Convention rights in the Croatian constitutional order. The Croatian case demonstrates how the fragmentation of assumptions about rights and law sometimes means more visible cultural politics and contestation over how to engage with European and international law, but can conversely mean no debate at all, as diffuse or incompatible cultural strands make it difficult for compliance actors to weave together meaningful interpretations of what makes the law legitimate for different audiences.
This chapter argues that the postwar German rights cultural context – grounded in notions of postwar transformation, strong judicial oversight to protect democratic values, openness to international cooperation, and pride in the creation of a constitutional order which places respect for human rights at its heart – contributes to understandings of compliance with ECtHR judgments as almost a fait accompli, even with politically sensitive or technically challenging judgments. Nonetheless, the careful and nuanced debates among German human rights actors, especially the powerful Federal Constitutional Court, over the precise balance between supranational oversight and sovereign autonomy, as well as over the relationships between human rights law and Holocaust memory, demonstrate that even broad acceptance of Strasbourg and general willingness to comply is contingent on the particular conceptions of human rights and international law that stem from Germany’s local cultural human rights context.
This chapter provides a brief history and overview of the structures and functions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It outlines the legal obligations Contracting States are required to fulfil as signatories to the ECHR, along with the processes by which states are supervised in executing their obligations – what states are expected to comply with and how. The chapter demonstrates how the normative underpinnings of the Convention and its supervisory institutions – their meaning, purpose, and potential – have shaped the nature of the obligations upon states, and the means by which they are enforced and obeyed. The delicate balance the system aims to strike, between effective international oversight across Europe and respecting the diverse approaches to rights protections of the Contracting States, has implications for understanding the nature of compliance with the ECtHR, because the expectations held by states and the Court for what constitutes a legitimate ruling and satisfactory compliance with it are fluid and subject to debate.
The European Court of Human Rights depends on the good faith cooperation of its members to implement judgement and maintain legitimacy, but how this translates into compliance varies both across and within states. This book presents an innovative framework for understanding how local cultures dynamically shape states’ ideas about what is and is not legitimate in international human rights regimes.
The book investigates compliance as a product of cultural politics. Case studies from the United Kingdom, Germany and Croatia reveal how states rely on local understanding of human rights and law to deal not only with compliance ‘sticking points’ but also to evaluate the legitimacy of the European human rights system as a whole.
This introduction outlines the crucial role that legitimacy plays in the European Court of Human Rights’ ability to elicit compliance from its member states, and the threats to that legitimacy from member states seeking to shirk their obligations. Positioning the book in existing conversations about legitimacy and cultures of compliance in the European human rights system, the introduction outlines a new framework for thinking about how ideas of legitimacy are the products of fluid and evolving cultural politics, to offer a more dynamic explanation of how culture informs interactions between the ECtHR and its Contracting States and shapes variation in compliance responses. The introduction also briefly explains the research design: an interpretive, comparative study of how local cultural contexts shape elite-level (government, media, judiciary) discourses about human rights and legitimacy in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Croatia.
This chapter argues that local cultural environments shape state actors’ assumptions about human rights and the legitimate ways to protect them. These cultural environments are heterogeneous and dynamic, and play crucial roles in informing state actors’ understandings of the international laws and legal systems with which they interact. The relationship between a state and international legal regime is shaped by the state’s cultural politics, as contestation and negotiation over the meaning and purpose of human rights shape how state actors decide or are persuaded that particular norms or laws are legitimate at a particular moment in time. Local cultural contexts are essential for understanding this relationship, because the discourses, practices, traditions, and ideas that constitute ideas about rights and law provide insight into how state actors interpret the role and importance of complying with international law.
This chapter shows that British discourses surrounding human rights contribute to perceptions that the British rights culture is superior to the European system. This perception champions the British institutions of parliamentary sovereignty, the common law, and so-called common-sense values as the best way to uphold rights, while casting the ECtHR as ‘foreign’, and run by judges who cannot comprehend the specific human rights needs of British society because they do not appreciate British culture. Focusing on cases concerning prisoner voting and treatment of terror suspects, the chapter argues that UK compliance actors are most likely to perceive ECtHR judgments as legitimate when they closely reflect British conceptions of rights and law, while noncompliance, although rare, arises when ECtHR judgments (appear to) fundamentally challenge these conceptions.
The concluding chapter takes stock of the overall experience of Russia’s membership to distil certain lessons for the future. It notes that although the authorities of Russia are exclusively responsible for their violations of the Convention and the Statute, the experience of engagement and the asymmetric responses by the CoE to the serious breaches of its norms point to systemic and structural weaknesses within the CoE. The chapter refers to these as the ‘Triple Fault’ scenario whereby the primary responsibility rests with Russia, due to its pattern of bad faith over many years, culminating in its gross violations of the Statute. A secondary failure relates to the inability or unwillingness of the CM to effectively safeguard the Statute despite progressive democratic decay in Russia and increasing hostility towards the rules-based international order, as demonstrated by the illegal annexation of Crimea. A third more conditional failure is that of the CoE system (to include the Convention system) to effectuate compliance with CoE values and standards. The chapter concludes by considering how the CoE might adapt to the ‘post-peace’ Europe, as well as the prospects of a future relationship with Russia.
