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.
Books: Research
Democracy and, for that matter, autocracy are not about measuring rights or equality, but about balancing dominance and belonging. To that extent, it is unlikely to empathize with how the Chinese socialist autocracy evolves without analyzing the governmental impacts of Confucianism. This book suggests that neither democracy nor autocracy can operate without a level of relational imagination to prepare the members of its political system to mind the needs of each other, especially between those acting in the name of the authorities and their people. Relational governmentality attends to the systemic capacity for limiting any system from segregating and suppressing the people. Democracy and autocracy, as stereotypical categories, can each suffer such involution but tentatively adopt each other’s relational style when attempting to restore the relational default. These cycles of relational order and chaos are not uniquely liberal or Confucian. In a nutshell, autocracy and democracy are not linear in time, nor binary in space, since the same population is always capable of shifting between relationalities that yield the two categories. Rather, the same processes of belonging and dominance constitute them.
Liberal political science misconceives socialist autocracy in China as the opposite, reinforcing its incapacity to explain the worldwide democratic recession in the 21st century and the failure of any democracy to recover. A fatal flaw of liberal scholarship lies in the conceptualization of politics as influencing the choices of independent individuals in aggregate. Practical consequences include a desire to avoid or convert allegedly illiberal systems according to a self-image of being participatory. Confucianism instead provides a governmentality clue to how all human gatherings evolve upon leadership struggling to balance dominance and belonging. Through Confucian enlightenment, leaders are convinced that all bad autocrats fall. So, leadership cannot survive without the willing following of the population. A derivative, tightly in line with the thrust of socialism, is that the population must be well-fed and protected. Such a relational lens considers people in their entirety while, epistemologically, desensitizing individual differences. However, political science tends to consult individual preferences, with the ironic consequence of a leadership losing sight of the entirety. A political science reconfigured through Confucianism reveals the false binary of democracy versus autocracy. It interrogates how leadership everywhere rebalances dominance and belonging to restore its relational sensibilities.
Chapter 3 elaborates on the autocratic governmentality that is challenged by the culture of solidarity. Comparing Western and Chinese political thought, the chapter pays particular attention to differential love for relational others, as opposed to universal love for humanity. Specifically, it will employ Confucianism to illustrate this kind of differential love – benevolent love between the autocrat and their claimed population. Benevolent love is, therefore, hierarchical rather than equal and yet potentially universal, because all necessarily play a role in the Confucian hierarchy, and yet are peculiarly equal nonetheless, to the extent that different identities outside these roles do not invite discrimination or even matter. It will also employ the concept of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (OCTS), which is Beijing’s policy for arranging Hong Kong’s way of belonging to China, to illustrate how the belief in benevolent love has caused a sense of repulsion toward the OCTS and critiques of it among those subscribing to a belief in universal love. Ironically, among activists who insist on Hong Kong’s autonomy, a differential sense of solidarity develops and challenges Beijing’s pursuit of benevolent unity.
This book relies on Confucianism to explore contemporary socialist governmentality in China and asks how, empirically as well as theoretically, China’s autocratic practices have strategized mainly Confucianism’s great ideas in different contexts as reification, revision, or resistance in terms of human relations of dominance and belonging. Chinese autocracy has been incomprehensible to a social science that is preoccupied with liberal assumptions about the rights of nature, particularly since the literature does not attend to the relational governmentality through which the autocrat and the people constitute each other. This book integrates Chinese autocratic governmentality into a cosmological translation that is informed by the hearts of the people to enable the self-unlearning of the Chinese autocrats and their Western watchers and create a more inclusive, non-binary understanding of both autocracy and democracy worldwide.
Drawing on the case of the Wuhan pandemic in 2019, Chapter 4 considers how nationalist discourses, informed by the culture of unity, took root and were transformed within China’s autocratic context during the period of quarantine. Following this, it adopts a relational perspective to argue that, just as the COVID-19 pandemic spotlighted countries’ vulnerability to all forms of nationalism and the danger that this represented, it also revealed an irony: that, despite being treated as a ‘solution’ to the pandemic, nationalism could only exist and thrive insofar as its ‘alter’ – represented by the novel coronavirus itself and, for some countries, the ‘China threat’ – also thrived. Given that nationalism rarely lasts long or enjoys much stability, Chapter 4 contends that, empirically as well as philosophically, nationalism is no solution to crises and that new thinking on coexistence is the vaccine needed to stabilize the post-COVID-19 world order.
Chapter 1, adopting a Confucian lens, connects the respective literature on state-in-society and Foucauldian governmentality by extending their application to autocratic resilience. First, the chapter points out that the state/society dichotomy is inapplicable where there exists no tradition of the rights of nature. The naturalness of the autocrat as part of society calls for an explanation of not only how and why people should accept the autocrat but also how and why the autocrat should care for or fear the people. The chapter uses narrative analysis to show that all references to the autocrat in the Chinese premodern texts imply a readiness among the people to alienate abusive autocracy and cause it to fear isolation. The people’s hearts constitute the ultimate regime of all regimes, which connotes the counter-governmentality of an autocracy to yield. The chapter thus suggests that in addition to the autocrat preparing the people to cooperate in certain ways, the imagined agency of the people to disengage likewise prepares the autocrat to cooperate. Counter-governmentality explains how autocracy is state-in-society or state-as-society.
Chapter 7 seeks to bring the relational concepts of Southern African Ubuntu and Chinese Tianxia into a dialogue. It compares the ontological and epistemological positions of Tianxia and Ubuntu and elaborates on the implications of the encounters between these two lenses. They similarly treat the self and the universe as mutually constituted relations. As both inspire the spontaneous pursuit of multiple relations, they can serve as either a resource or a constraint to preach autocratic governmentality. Ubuntu is closer to the micro-universe, while Tianxia lies at the macro end of the spectrum. Ubuntu is often criticized for being used/idealized as a macro theory. As this chapter argues, however, the pluriverse is co-constituted by both the micro and the macro. The chapter likewise translates the Western notion of the state of nature as well as both Ubuntu and Tianxia into a universal language to adapt them to suit an audience who lies outside each’s familiar cultural zones. Such communication reveals how the coexistence of different cosmological relations is plausible, unilateral assimilation is unlikely, and pluriversalism is always an ongoing process.
Chapter 6 attempts to create a theory of relations and balances (R&B) to clarify the systemic stability of democracy. It draws on Confucianism and compares Confucian self-restraint with liberal self-restraint. The empirical evidence suggests that, on the one hand, a Confucian constituency dislikes challenges being issued to the authorities for the sake of systemic stability yet, on the other, disapproves of unlimited authoritarian control on the pretext of maintaining a harmonious system. The evidence additionally suggests that, if the systemic identity is weak, the constituency of R&B shows greater support for inclusive, rather than enforcive, autocracy to restore governability. The R&B support for systemic inclusiveness may be mistaken for liberalism. Coupled with the idea of civic nationalism, the contemporary constitutionalism of checks and balances neglects systemic stability and fails to explain the spread of illiberal democracy due to the loss of systemic belonging. The R&B explanation of how a democracy can maintain or lose stability belongs to a systemic level.
Chapter 2 presents the critical logic that social science’s methodological individualism restrains liberal democracy from recovering from involution. It also explains why socialist and Confucian autocracy might recover. Two features of liberalism and Confucianism distinguish the ways in which they cope with involution. First, regarding their imagined origin being a transcendental norm or law-like inevitability, contemporary socialist/Confucian autocracy and liberal democracy cope with involution in different ways. Second, the Confucian norms mainly prepare the autocrats to practice (counter-)governmentality, but liberalism must be preached to all individuals. Deliberative democracy and the mass line are compared as the remedies to involution for each system. After all, liberalism’s normative governmentality is not binding. The democratic transition to new leadership costs no one their life or property as a result. Moreover, the losers can rally at the next election and might win. Recovery is unnecessary for liberal leadership to consider a survival strategy. Put succinctly, liberal leaders do not care.
This chapter studies Chinese President Xi Jinping’s political ideas as his references to self-in-relation, rather than his schema to assess and treat alters-in-relation. In addition to facilitating the assessment of the world and policymaking, personality may cause the political actors to use ideas conversely: to engage in self-preparation for acceptance and welcome by their perceived constituencies. In terms of Xi Jinping’s evolving personality, his initial need to overcome a sense of vulnerability due to a failure to belong was satisfied through coalescence into the masses. Xi’s personality has grown into a quest for popularity through the mass line, informed by 1) a Buddhist thread of transcendence in terms of anti-corruption purges while practising the Party self, 2) a Confucian thread of unity to produce self-disciplining cadres and an affluent society while practising the national self, and 3) a socialist thread of materialism to meet the needs of the world while practising the international self. The illustrative programmes include anti-corruption, the Chinese dream of anti-poverty, and the shared future of humankind. The chapter likewise discusses how an autocracy can suffer involution.
