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
This chapter outlines the major conceptual and theoretical assumptions underlying the book’s analysis and presents the state of research. It conceptualizes regional organizations as a specific type of ‘international society’ and argues that self-created regional organizations – as new international societies – are ideal platforms to promote a state’s norms. When examining the use of a regional organization as a tool to promote norms internationally, the following three factors should be considered: institutionalization of the norms ‘on paper’, their institutionalization ‘in action’, and dissemination of the norms with the help of the regional organization.
This chapter and the next one analyse what kind of international order the official documents of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) conceptualize and scrutinize China’s influence on the codification of crucial concepts. Although many of these concepts remain vague and ambiguous, the in-depth analysis allows for discerning a conception of international relations that presents itself as an alternative to the prevailing system dominated by the norms and values of the liberal international society. This chapter starts the analysis of the SCO’s normative scheme with an examination of three concepts that are distinctive for the organization’s political rhetoric: ‘Shanghai Spirit’, ‘New International Order’, and ‘Three Evils’. It pays particular attention to the question of how far the SCO’s official norms correspond to those promoted by China as a unilateral actor to assess China’s normative power. The analysis reveals that all three concepts were first advocated either by China individually or by China and Russia together. Thus, the core norms endorsed by the SCO are in accord with China’s scheme for shaping international relations.
The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s main findings and puts them in the broader context of China’s foreign policy ambitions and role in global international society. After recapitulating the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s significance as an instrument for enhancing China’s normative power, it discusses some implications for international relations research. The chapter concludes by addressing the limitations of this study and questions demanding future research.
This chapter introduces the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as the main object of research. Besides sketching the SCO’s creation, structure, and overall workings, this chapter also deals with the power relations between the different member states. To elucidate its member states’ interaction at various levels, it reviews the SCO’s primary functions and activities in the fields of security, economics, cultural and humanitarian endeavour, and political cooperation. Besides secondary sources, the chapter draws on interview data generated in China in 2018 to offer unique insights into Chinese perspectives on the organization’s emergence, nature, and challenges. This will convey an overall impression of the strengths and limitations of this regional organization as an instrument of Chinese foreign policy.
This chapter turns to how the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) extends its ‘circle of friends’ to disseminate its normative views within global international society. It first outlines the SCO practice of granting non-member states varying associate status. Second, the admission of India and Pakistan as full member states is discussed in the context of expanding the membership of the regional international society, followed by a brief discussion of Iran’s admission as ninth full member. Third, SCO efforts to increase its international influence and prestige by concluding formal partnerships with other regional and international organizations are treated, including its cooperation with the United Nations as the embodiment of global international society. The chapter ends with a glimpse of some first overt SCO attempts to influence the normative system of the United Nations directly.
The introductory chapter presents the context and background of the research as well as the book’s research questions. It highlights the originality and relevance of the research and introduces the qualitative methodological approach. The chapter concludes with a short outline of the structure of the book.
This chapter explores the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)’s reaction to and proposals for settling three major issues that occurred in the wider SCO region between 2001 and 2023, namely the Kyrgyzstan revolutions of 2005 and 2010, the instability in Afghanistan, and the Iran nuclear issue. The aim is to understand the norms of interstate and intra-state conflicts that the SCO invokes in the context of specific cases directly affecting its member and associate states and clarifying to what extent the SCO’s actual policies adhere to the norms endorsed in the organization’s official documents. Despite their differences, the SCO has reverted to similar arguments in all three crises, which provides a clue to the rules that the organization wants to see prevailing in international relations. These rules are summarized under the following headings: (1) unique competence of regional actors to resolve regional issues; (2) support of ruling governments; (3) multilateral solutions under the guidance of the United Nations; and (4) primacy of peaceful multilateral solutions over military action. They can be traced back and correspond to the norms and concepts the SCO has institutionalized in its constitutive documents, above all the principle of non-interference.
This chapter analyses the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)’s reaction to three international security issues outside the immediate SCO region: the Syrian Civil War, the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, and the Ukraine crisis and war since 2014. SCO member state Russia has been militarily involved in each of these conflicts, which runs counter to some of the most characteristic norms of the SCO, such as non-interference, non-military action, and searching for peaceful, diplomatic solutions. The chapter not only highlights the SCO’s response to non-regional issues but also provides empirical insight into what happens when one of the most powerful members of a regional organization – in this case, Russia – acts in contradiction to a norm promoted by the other leader and fails to ‘institutionalize’ the norm ‘in action’. The investigation sheds new light on China’s ability to promote its norms with the help of the SCO and qualifies some of the findings of Chapter 6. After examining the organization’s reactions to the three external crises separately, the chapter discusses and summarizes the SCO’s norms ‘in action’ in the context of all six crises treated in this and the previous chapter.
This book investigates China’s use of a self-created regional organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), to shape global norms. It argues that self-created regional organizations constitute ideal platforms for emerging powers to promote their normative views internationally. On the one hand, they can serve as frameworks within which to institutionalize the power’s norms, and on the other, they can assist in the dissemination of these norms among a larger group of states. As the first and most established regional organization ever initiated by China, analysis of the SCO provides crucial insights into the Chinese government’s ambitions for norms and rules of contemporary international relations. Based on the analysis of over 400 hand-coded original Chinese-language documents and 18 semi-structured interviews, the research finds that China has used the SCO as a regional platform that both represents and helps promote China’s core normative views and concepts internationally. The organization has institutionalized these formally and in practical actions, and proactively engages in promoting its normative system among a large group of states, including on the stage of the United Nations. The study furthermore finds that numerous states beyond the SCO already share many of the norms and values promoted by the organization, making apparent the contours of an emerging international society that could become an alternative to liberal international society.
Assuming that China’s ambitions as a normative power go beyond the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), this chapter gives examples of how China, with the help of the SCO, attempts to institute specific interpretations of existing norms and infuse its own concepts into the discourse of global international society. The first section outlines the SCO’s codification of China’s interpretation of the universally accepted ‘principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states’. Following, it turns to the organization’s changed interpretation of a major norm of liberal international society: ‘democracy’. Third, the SCO’s institutionalization of the ‘Community of Common Destiny’ is discussed, which is a concept China has created and strives to promote globally. The analysis reveals that China has been able to use the SCO as a multilateral platform to institutionalize its interpretation of existing international norms and support the promotion of a flagship concept of its foreign policy. The last part of the chapter highlights the ambiguity and overlap of norms championed by China to explain the connections between the concepts.
