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 uses a systems theory perspective to examine how the globalization processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries affected social contacts, societal groups, and social change. It looks at developments and changes that took place in the nineteenth century that point to both continuities and ruptures with earlier epochs and their further consolidation and elaboration throughout the twentieth century. It also discusses a sociological perspective on a 'long twentieth century' and discernible transformations of the social world, which provided the foundation for a global modernity and popularized the aspiration towards it. The chapter implies an interest in fundamental sociological concepts, namely communication, differentiation, and evolution. It investigates the integral part of a long-term transformation that is developed by fundamental or societal revolution.
This chapter explores the possibilities of a fruitful exchange between world society theory and global history approaches. It uses turning points in analyzing the quality of the accounts of the exchange and confirms whether these accounts of significant change can be linked to one another. It also mentions the unification of global history and world society theory in rejecting any obvious 'telos' of history. The chapter explains that in global history, the rejection takes the form of a narrative in which history unfolds as nothing but a transformation of complexity, while in world society theory it takes the form of a theory of social evolution. It discusses possible substantive overlaps between global history and world society theory, which focuses on epochal change, the role of the long nineteenth century, and the role of single big events or turning points.
This chapter explores how the Bourdieusian field theory can be deployed to make sense of global dynamics. It mentions international relations (IR) scholars that have enlisted Bourdieu in their analyses, applied his work to international issues, and taken certain concepts, such as habitus and practice, from his larger theoretical conceptual apparatus. It also focuses on three transformative processes or macro-historical turning points: the expansion of colonial empires during the phase of 'high imperialism', the two world wars, and the post-war end of formal colonial empires that heralded the rise to dominance of the modern nation state. The chapter maps the points of differentiation between field theory approaches and other approaches. It recognizes other key elements of Bourdieusian field theory, such as fields that consist of objective relations between actors and the subjective and cultural forms of those relations.
This chapter discusses how an international political system was eventually established while being theoretically anchored in the world society approaches of modern systems theory. It talks about a system of global reach within which struggles over collectively binding decisions are played out. It also looks at central dynamics that have shaped the evolution of international politics and its imperial underpinnings. The chapter argues that this system allowed a better understanding of what happened after the modern international political system, which became firmly established as a distinct and recognizable social field. It emphasizes that this global system was also the result of social evolution and have been subject to ongoing transformations ever since.
This chapter emphasizes how understanding the impact of communications can help the interdisciplinary thrust to integrate sociology with history and international relations (IR). It discusses a global history of how communications affected populations around the world, which demonstrates why they played a key role in differentiation. It also talks about how colonialism helped to entrench imperial rule for decades before anticolonial activists used some Western communications systems in their favour. The chapter assesses the contemporary situation, where American-owned social media companies appeared to be the drivers of democratic social change during the Arab Spring of 2011, but now seem to foster conspiracy-theory-driven violence. It presents nine different forms of impact, subdivided into cultural, economic, political, and environmental clusters that illustrate the myriad uneven global effects of communications over time and space.
This chapter introduces questions that need to be addressed when thinking about global social change. It discusses the cross-fertilizations between the various branches of global history, world society theories, global historical sociology, postcolonial studies, and theories of international relations. It also cites the criticism of a methodological nationalism that was not seen fit for a comprehensive understanding of historical and contemporary global social orders and their dynamics. The chapter explores the emergence of a paradigm from cross-disciplinary debates that make use of the empirical knowledge accumulated in the globalization scholarship of recent decades. It examines the theoretical standpoints that guide the empirical work in different disciplines.
This chapter develops a new narrative of the emergence of a global system of trade law since the mid-nineteenth century. It identifies a continuous attempt to establish and elaborate systems of interpolity law that is designed to regulate economic exchanges on a global scale. It also talks about a central feature of global social change in the 'long twentieth century' that is understood in terms of the elaboration of global communicative infrastructures. The chapter recounts the rise of world trade law, which enabled the expansion and growing status of a transnational body of trade diplomats, consuls, economists and economic lawyers. It looks at projects of international economic law that were often associated with liberal ideals of 'free trade' and described as pliable instruments that could support regionalist or protectionist ambitions.
This chapter elaborates how nationalism has long been underestimated in both sociological theory and globalization studies. It mentions sociological theorists who have theorized the role of nationalism in modernity and globalization literature, and who have tended to see globalization and nationalism as being in a zero-sum relationship. It also highlights a historical-sociological perspective on the nationalism–globalization nexus, which allows nationalism to be studied as a global institution. The chapter connects recent insights into inconspicuous 'banal' forms of nationalism to insights from globalization studies. It emphasizes two types of nationalism: 'institutionalized nationalism' and 'scarcity nationalism', showing how they have been reinforced by globalization dynamics and facilitated by the emergence of a global media system.
This chapter investigates the emergence of the idea of international organization in the nineteenth century and argues that the perception of organization for the world accompanied the foundation of states from the very beginning. It clarifies how the emergence of states is not a precondition for international organization, as states and international organization are co-constitutive. It also describes the period between the Congress of Vienna and World War I as the founding period of world organization, the phase when the idea of organizing and organizations emerged in several fields of society. The chapter shows that the idea of organizing is deeply rooted in debates among legal scholars in the nineteenth century, and that the idea of world organization contained a more comprehensive and encompassing understanding of the world. It demonstrates how organizing the world took place in different forms that are still relevant today or have been reinvigorated in recent years.
This chapter reviews an experimental setting that is of major relevance in world politics, particularly international military, and humanitarian interventions in armed conflicts. It defines the laboratories of world society as societies that are subject to intervention. It also talks about the enactment, stabilization, and negotiation of an abstract and global epistemic, and normative and political order in human interaction, which makes them productive fields for the study of social change in world society. The chapter sketches the potential of an approach based on an ethnographic research into the intervention in Afghanistan. It focuses on one field of interventionist politics that has attracted particular attention and controversy: policies to empower women.
