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
This chapter analyzes the various framing techniques employed by Bangladeshi, Myanmarese (Burmese), and global media to characterize the Rohingya refugee crisis. This chapter delves deeper into the reasons for and effects of the media’s political economics and ideology on the framing of the Rohingya refugee crisis. Many factors, including those in society, government, the economy, culture, race, religion, and international relations, all have a role in how the Rohingya refugee crisis is covered in the news. This chapter examines the ways in which the political ideology of media outlets and their roots affect media content through the use of manipulation, distortion, and bias. It is clear from a variety of evidence that the Rohingyas were specifically targeted for genocide because of their ethnicity and religion.
This chapter provides a summary of the findings and overall conclusions presented in the preceding chapters, bringing together the most important ideas from the book. Based on the findings, this chapter makes some recommendations for how the world should deal with the Rohingyas upon their return and resettlement. The chapter emphasizes the importance of the media in such situations. The chapter also compiles a few major recommendations and evaluates the Myanmar government’s narratives in relation to those of regional and international credible media outlets to determine their veracity. In this final chapter, the contribution to the scholarship is precisely highlighted.
The history of Rohingya refugees is examined in this section. Muslim Rohingyas have been persecuted and subjected to regular brutal treatment in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar for decades. Their lack of citizenship stems from a 1948 law that the Burmese government has refused to amend. Since most Rohingyas are not legal residents, they have trouble getting jobs and accessing education and healthcare, and it’s tough for them to travel around the country. This chapter explores race, politics, religion, and international relations as they relate to the book’s major themes. The chapter describes the Rohingyas’ escape to safety and offers an explanation for the international community’s relative indifference to the problem up until this point.
The plight of Rohingya Muslims in Bangladeshi camps has garnered little attention in the local press. Instead, the media has focused on reports of atrocities committed by the Rohingyas in Rahkine. The stories are written in such a way that the international community is unable to empathize with these people in life-threatening situations. Narratives impact how the world perceives the Rohingyas. While the media can highlight Rohingya refugees’ voices and depict various aspects of the crisis, the problem remains unresolved. Despite the fact that the crisis has captured the attention of people globally, the media’s representation of the Rohingya refugee crisis is rather disputed. Local media has described the Rohingyas as criminals, burdens, and security risks in the majority of cases. The Myanmar media, on the other hand, framed the Rohingya refugees’ narratives in such a way that world leaders and the international community feel little sympathy for them. As a result, the Rohingya refugee problem continues to grow by the day, and the ongoing Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh is producing a host of economic, social, and political issues.
The first chapter, therefore, describes the central premise of the book, the research methodology and analytical framework of the study, and the contribution of this work to the wider body of knowledge. This chapter discusses the causes and drivers of identity-based politics in the Rohingya population as well as the complex challenges of managing the large-scale Rohingya exodus in Bangladesh and how to best resolve these in the long run.
Set against widespread refugee problems, and those of the Rohingyas in particular, this chapter proposes a thorough theory of refugees that places a premium on endogenous elements, including political and religious motivations. It also demonstrates how the media’s framing of the issue affects the perception of it. This chapter emphasizes the importance of understanding media framing in trying to comprehend the larger implications of mass communication, since it offers an alternative to the ‘objectivity and bias paradigm’. This chapter also delves into the history of human rights and the current predicament of the Rohingya people, as well as a number of important historical events that have affected the evolution of the Rohingya situation.
The 2017 persecution of the Rohingyas resulted in around a million Rohingyas fleeing to Bangladesh, India and Malaysia.
This book investigates the complex challenges of managing the large-scale refugee exodus in Bangladesh and how best to resolve these challenges in the future. Using a mixed method approach that includes a survey, key informant interviews and numerous short case studies of persecution, the authors also examine the problematic influence of the media, as local depictions of Rohingya refugees often caused further tension and divides in the midst of the refugee crisis. The book’s analysis offers a deeper understanding of the causes and drivers of identity-based politics among Myanmar’s Rohingya.
This book unpacks the political economy of China’s COVID-19 vaccine supplies to the Global South. Examining the political and economic forces at play, the book demonstrates how China’s vaccine provisions have been determined by a complex set of commercial interests, domestic politics, and geopolitical relationships.
The book sheds light on how domestic interests shape China’s role in global governance and its international economic engagement. Its analysis contributes to broader academic debates on the politics and economics of crises, as well as offering new insights on how pre-existing political and market forces shape aid and trade in the context of crisis.
This concluding chapter summarizes the book’s core arguments and findings, namely that China’s overseas vaccine supplies are driven principally by commercial imperatives, as well as by the party-state’s need to maintain its performance-based legitimacy domestically. It then discusses some broader implications of this analysis. With respect to China’s foreign relations, the findings of this book point to the importance of domestic factors and state-corporate linkages in shaping China’s external interactions. With respect to international political economy, they offer insights into how crises are shaped by existing institutions and patterns, but also provide new opportunities for actors able and willing to seize them. The chapter finishes by looking ahead to the future of Chinese vaccine supplies overseas as production and exchange of COVID-19 vaccines becomes a routine transaction. It outlines both the challenges of increasing competition from other players (in particular, those further ahead in the use of mRNA technologies) and successive variants of the virus, as well as promising opportunities for further development, in particular in vaccine manufacturing collaborations in the Global South.
This chapter lays out the pre-pandemic initial conditions that shaped China’s overseas COVID-19 vaccine supplies by contextualizing China’s position in global health in recent history. First, it describes China’s domestic health governance and its increasing importance to the party-state’s performance-based legitimacy, in particular following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Next, it charts China’s role in health sector foreign aid and international health governance institutions, highlighting Beijing’s longstanding preference for bilateral cooperation over multilateral engagement through institutions such as the WHO. Finally, it describes China’s position in the global pharmaceutical industry and vaccine markets, which has expanded rapidly in recent years – facilitated in part by state support for technological innovation – but nonetheless pre-pandemic was relatively weak compared to other major industrialized economies.
This chapter sets the scene for the analysis in the remainder of the book. It describes the developmental and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South, as well as the inequities in global vaccine supplies, in particular during the first wave of the vaccine rollout in which vaccine nationalism in the West created a space for China to step in to. It then situates the book in context by reviewing existing understandings of China’s relationship with the Global South, and of the political economy of crises. Next, the chapter summarizes the analytical framework and main argument: that the distribution of Chinese COVID-19 vaccines was shaped by the ‘opportunity management’ of state and corporate actors, with the former seeking to consolidate their performance-based legitimacy and the latter to expand internationally into new products and markets. Finally, the chapter describes the data sources and provides a roadmap of the book.
