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 zooms in on three structural factors located on different levels of analysis that are frequently emphasized in the FPA literature as important for bringing about policy change. Those are: international pressure; bureaucratic pressure; and societal pressure. The discussion explores the extent to which those factors offer similar or even better explanations of the fundamental changes in U.S.-Cuba policy during the Obama administration than the one based on the leader-centered theory of foreign policy change presented in the previous chapter.
This book introduced a leader-centered theory of foreign policy change and applied said theory to examine changes in the U.S.-Cuba policy during the Obama administration. This concluding section proceeds in three steps. It first summarizes the argument of the book. It then briefly explores the extent to which the proposed theory can account for additional changes, in the form of reversals of Obama’s policy changes, that were introduced by his successor Donald Trump. The discussion concludes with avenues for future research.
This introduction proceeds in six steps. The next section reviews the FPA literature on foreign policy change and highlights the lack of clarity concerning the role of leaders as drivers, or agents, of major foreign policy change. The following section introduces core tenets of the “leader-centered theory of foreign policy change” whose aim is to address the aforementioned shortcoming. The discussion then turns to the empirical case to which the leader-centered theory is applied, in form of changes in U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba during the Obama administration. Next, alternative explanatory factors are introduced that the FPA literature proposes as key drivers of foreign policy change and which potentially may provide equally good, if not better, explanations for the case under examination. The penultimate section discusses the aspired contributions of this book to the scholarly debate about foreign policy change in general and the specific case of U.S. foreign policy change toward Cuba in particular. The introduction concludes with a brief plan of the book.
Foreign policy analysis is a major part of international relations scholarship, yet many models are ill-equipped to examine the effects of individual leadership on policy. Written by a leading figure in the field, this innovative account challenges traditional views in international relations by theorising the influence of individual leaders on foreign policy change. It examines how and why leaders have shaped policy throughout history, showcasing Obama's Cuba pivot as a prime example.
Using an original theoretical approach, this book will appeal to academics and practitioners in foreign policy analysis, international relations and comparative politics.
This chapter introduces a “leader-centered theory of foreign policy change.” The theory seeks to account for the independent, systematic, and predictable effect of leaders in bringing about major changes in a country’s foreign policy, in the sense of broader redirections that entail multiple decisions spanning different issue areas. More specifically, the theory explores the possible effect of leaders on the “why,” the “what,” and the “how” of foreign policy change in terms of: (a) the reasons due to which leaders try to fundamentally redirect their countries’ foreign policy, which is henceforth referred to as “triggering change”; (b) the substantive direction in which leaders seek to change foreign policy, which is henceforth referred to as “guiding change”; and (c) the actions that leaders undertake to bring about change in the domestic political arena, which is henceforth referred to as “implementing change.”
This chapter opens with a discussion of whether U.S.-Cuba policy during the Obama administration actually qualifies as an instance of major policy change. It suggests that this is indeed the case as per Charles Hermann’s typology. The chapter then explores whether President Obama had a systematic and predictable effect on the redirection of U.S. policy toward Cuba. To that end, the chapter first examines whether Obama considered the Cuba policy of his predecessors as a major policy failure, which is considered as main trigger for the initiation of policy change (“triggering change”). The chapter then identifies Obama’s political beliefs with respect to Cuba. Based on a comparison with the beliefs of his immediate predecessor George W. Bush, the chapter infers the direction of policy change that U.S. foreign policy should have taken based on Obama’s “Cuba beliefs” and examines whether those expectations align with the empirical record (“guiding change”). Finally, the chapter ascertains Obama’s leadership traits. On that basis, it develops expectations on how Obama should have gone about putting his goal of changing U.S.-Cuba policy into practice and finally matches those expectations with the empirical record (“implementing change”).
Unaccompanied children on the move have featured prominently in global politics, with significant implications for those children and for potential host countries. In 2015–2016, growing numbers of asylum applications in Europe coincided with increased attention to this cohort and their political significance. Engaging with literature on unaccompanied migrant children and their perceived impacts on host societies, we apply discourse analysis to examine unaccompanied children’s representation in UK parliamentary debates during this period, when public concerns regarding children on the move increased alongside major related political debates in Europe, including the Brexit decision in mid-2016. Considering data accessed via Hansard, we report on key findings and implications for understandings of migrant children, their roles in global politics, and perceptions of childhood. We pay special attention to the overlap and clash of discourses, including those expressing concern for children’s security or focusing on these children as potential security threats.
Children migrate alone, creating tension between a child rights approach and global migration governance. States cannot deny children’s rights because it would be an immoral violation of international law, yet states adopt different strategies to control child migration. This chapter briefly discusses two such strategies: using different representations of children like ‘anchor children and babies’ as a migration strategy to restrict children’s rights, and employing the ‘imposter children’ category to recognize agency as an adulthood characteristic. Both strategies draw from a discourse of protection from harm and children’s rights to restrict their rights to asylum, family reunification, recognition as a child, and their best interests. This chapter illustrates these strategies, considering how politicians and the media dealt with recent migration situations, mostly in Global North countries. These critical reflections contribute to understanding how states strategically employ specific representations of children in migration and border control.
Too often, governments and international institutions engage children and young people through rhetoric alone. Facing climate crisis, children and young people globally find themselves at the centre of liberal policy and advocacy spaces, thanks to their own mobilization and their moral position as those most impacted by current and future ecological catastrophes and their socio-political consequences. This chapter identifies how neoliberal institutions have foregrounded children and young people as global political actors in the climate crisis, often co-opting their participation for their own aims. Such institutions highlight the nexus of education and climate action while prioritizing a narrative that discounts the root causes of climate injustice and the possible solutions, often coming from marginalized voices. Using first-hand knowledge of the potential of ‘transformative education’ in (re)making global political worlds, we argue for the importance of creating a critical education approach and praxis that will inform current and future climate action.
This chapter uses toys licensed by the UK’s Ministry of Defence to explore intersections of militarism and childhood, and the interplay between domination and resistance discourses. Promising to ‘transport kids into the adventurous world of military manoeuvres’, the brand arguably demonstrates an ideologically charged form of militarism. However, we consider the role of children’s play in co-constituting cultures of everyday militarism, addressing the toy not merely as a power-laden text to be ‘read’ for its ideological meaning but also as something that children engage with on an embodied level. This advances arguments about children’s ability to enact agency and resistance. Academics and public discourse have only recently considered children as meaningful political actors (Beier, 2015), partly because of the definition and understanding of political acts, specifically resistance (Hughes, 2020). Instead of conceiving resistance only as intentional, with pre-determined goals, paying attention to children playing with war toys becomes a means of thinking differently about their political agency and ability to enact resistance.
