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
Focusing on inward foreign direct investment (FDI) screening, this book provides an in-depth analysis of how European states’ economic interactions with China have become a security issue.
Based on 100 interviews with scholars, journalists, policy makers, and politicians from across Europe, the book underscores the importance of the policy making process that led to the adoption of investment screening in European nations. It adopts the theory of securitization to analyse the passage of the status of Chinese FDI from economy to security. In doing so, it shows how the shifting view of Europeans is attributed to changes such as China’s growing economic presence, the persistence of non-market practices, the loss of competitiveness, and the use of economic statecraft.
This chapter tests the criticism by analysing the role that economic competitiveness – rather than national security – had in shaping part of Europe’s economic security discourse. The chapter also places the accent on the importance of personal preferences of influential actors, such as prime ministers and ministers, in shaping the national – but also regional – economic security debate and agenda. In the cases of the more protectionist countries the process of securitization was triggered by an existing propensity to protect national assets, by the EU-level debate, and by the decision of national stakeholders to address the issue domestically. Remarkably, Italy stands out as the only case in this book where the screening mechanism is repeatedly employed to prevent Chinese acquisitions before they reached the notification stage, and even retroactively unravelling existing deals.
This chapter traces the transformation of economic interactions between the EU and China, specifically Chinese investments, from being welcomed to becoming a security concern for the EU. It treats the EU as a single actor, capable of proposing and adopting legislation and making decisions as a unified entity. The analysis of the process that led to adoption of the EU framework for FDI screening firstly demonstrates how a divisive policy, such as a security approach to the economy, was embraced by most actors and member states and normalized. Secondly, it examines the interplay between security and economic aspects in the EU–China relationship. The chapter analyses the process that led to the perception of FDI and other economic interactions as security threats. The analysis focuses on three key elements: the role of Chinese investments, the influence of economic and security considerations, and the main actors involved in the process.
The focus of this book is on Europe, but economic security is a global debate. In Europe and in the world, it has been moving forward from screening FDI into areas that include supply chains, trade, data management, and economic coercion, to mention a few. Since 2017, countries such as Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, and the US have all implemented significant restrictions on economic openness based on security concerns. These changes have accelerated rapidly since the Covid-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2023. A number of plurilateral frameworks and fora with a strong economic security agenda have emerged. Notably, the G7 has prioritized economic security and coordination. This chapter provides an overview of how other global actors approach economic security and compares them with the current state of affairs and debates in the EU and the UK.
This book shows that foreign direct investments from China have been at the forefront of tensions between economic opportunity and security risks due to their role in market access and asset acquisition. The book seeks to identify the actors and stakeholders in the EU, and their involvement in the process of securitization – the methods and mechanisms used to transform Chinese FDI from a purely economic matter into a security issue. If views emerge of Chinese FDI as a threat, then these views will induce the transformation of FDI from an economic to a security issue, and trigger a process that facilitates the securitization of other economic interactions. While this claim may sound commonsensical and unsurprising, it is rarely substantiated in wider empirical assessments of the elements that led to the connection between Chinese foreign investment and national security.
A diverse group of European states struggled to internalize the securitization process. These states include cases where the processes were only marginally prompted by the EU’s debate (the UK), and cases where it took longer for the process to start and to conclude (the Netherlands), but overall, they share two common traits: the longstanding attachment to an ideology of open markets and competition, and the absence of a strong legal predecessor to the new regulation for FDI screening. Nonetheless, a line of difference emerges in how the process develops. In the UK, for example, the economic security discourse demonstrates a strong inclination towards protecting narrow national security interests. The pivotal role of the Dutch company ASML has been shaping the stance in the Netherlands, pushing the debate on the country’s economic security to take competitiveness into consideration and touch upon issues such as adopting policies to safeguard technological edge.
Chapter 1 introduces and develops the academic debate around the process of securitization in the economic sector. This chapter shows that economy and security are increasingly interconnected and understanding the dynamics that inform the securitization of these economic interactions is a fundamental exercise to improve our comprehension of changing global dynamics. The theory of securitization of non-traditional security issues (NTS) provides an excellent explanatory tool to unpack how global actors are changing the way in which they look at economy. For example, the debates about the theory contribute to our understanding of how threats in the economic sector tend to be characterized by long-term implications rather than immediate repercussions and guided by a logic of risk rather than of an existential threat.
This chapter outlines the analytical framework that guides this book. It rests on research on international cooperation and develops a multidimensional concept of (non-)cooperation. The chapter further details the areas in which the book provides new theoretical insights to research on international cooperation and highlights the book’s contribution to the study of cooperation and non-cooperation in international politics. Finally, the chapter concludes with a section discussing the key concepts for the subsequent analysis and orients the reader on the empirical material scrutinized in this book.
Elucidating the odds of cooperation between international actors is one of the primary concerns of IR research and a core element of most theoretical debates. Also, in Chinese IR research, cooperation (referred to as hezuo 合作) is an important concept, albeit one that is only vaguely defined. In IR, which depicts the international system as an anarchic environment cooperation is a puzzle per se. Even more striking is the observation of cooperation between actors that are so inherently different as the EU and China. To understand what motivates them to cooperate, it is necessary to understand the underlying modes and mechanisms of cooperation and non-cooperation in international politics in general. The book will now turn to the messiness of different definitions of cooperation and non-cooperation in international politics, also referring to the Chinese understanding of international cooperation, as deeply rooted in Confucianism. The chapter seeks to make sense of this messiness by briefly outlining existing definitions of cooperation and non-cooperation.
China’s rise a global power is arguably one of the most important international developments of our time. Going from the world’s largest developing power to an emerging pillar of world politics, China is on its way to becoming a new superpower with the potential to challenge the current world order. In line with this development, a widespread debate has emerged concerning the implications of China’s rise. With regard to the EU, these implications have been discussed primarily in terms of economic relations, neglecting the changing relationship of the EU and China in the security realm. Similarly, cooperation in EU–China relations has hitherto received scant academic attention, with most European research outputs focusing on the challenges, risks and threats emanating from China and its increased international engagement. The ambition of this book was to disentangle the complex Sino-European relationship in the security realm and to explore and explain the modes and mechanisms that lead to cooperation between the EU and China beyond the scope of trade and investment. It was driven by the presumption that EU–China security cooperation is not a normative agenda, but rather an empirical issue (Christiansen et al, 2019). To answer it, we had to probe deeper into various security dimensions. The purpose of this concluding chapter is to bring together and compare the individual analytical chapters and to combine temporal patterns with the findings from the cross-sectional analyses of three exemplary security issues. Based on the preceding analyses, the chapter seeks to put the book’s main findings in a wider context and points towards the potential and challenges of future avenues for the development of EU–China security relations.
