Our Politics and International Relations list engages with today’s global challenges and with political change at domestic and international levels. It includes work from across the subdisciplines and reflects the variety of approaches and methods used in political analysis.
Book highlights include the Bristol Studies in East Asian International Relations and Bristol Studies in International Theory series, the Policy & Politics and European Journal of Politics and Gender journals and work from prestigious authors such as Andrew Gamble, Andrew Linklater, Laura Shepherd and Keith Dowding.
Our journals in the area are Policy & Politics, ranked 15th of 49 in Public Administration and celebrated its 50th year in 2022, Global Discourse, the European Journal of Politics and Gender and Global Political Economy.
Politics and International Relations
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This chapter analyses the practical utility of the academic field of public administration by exploring the relevance of published research and policy directions set forth by past administrations. The goal is to examine whether the demands of each administration matched with the supply of research being performed during those years from President Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003) to President Park Geun-hye (2013–17). To understand the overarching direction and policy goals of each presidency, the president’s inaugural address, New Year speeches and the government agenda put forward at the time of inauguration were analysed. Results indicate that available research in Korean public administration and policy doctrines has been and most likely will continue to be well aligned with the strategies and policy goals of the incumbent president.
Most major think tanks in Korea are government-funded research institutes. They play a dominant role in making and analysing government policies, compared to other types of think tanks. The Korean government established two research councils to support, foster, guide and systematically manage these research institutes and stipulated two comprehensive acts to regulate them efficiently. Policy analysis activities conducted by government-funded research institutes can be classified according to whether analysis and research are ex-ante or ex-post. It is necessary to place higher weights on ex-ante analysis. It is desirable to guarantee complete autonomy and financial independence of government-funded research institutes. Also, there is a need to reinforce the role of the research councils in promoting collaborative research projects across multiple government-funded research institutes.
The city of Bristol, UK, set out to pursue a just transition to climate change in 2020. This paper explores what happened next. We set out to study how just transition is unfolding politically on the ground, focusing on procedural justice. Over the course of a year, we conducted interviews and observations to study decision making at three levels – public sector, private sector and civil society. We found that not only is it difficult to define what just transition means, even for experts, but that the process of deciding how to pursue such a transition is highly exclusionary, especially to women and ethnic minorities. We therefore argue there is an urgency to revise decision-making procedures and ensure that there is ample opportunity to feed into decision-making processes by those who are typically excluded. Inclusive decision making must be embedded into the process of just transition from the beginning and throughout its implementation – it is not a step that can be ‘ticked off’ and then abandoned, but rather an ongoing process that must be consistently returned to. Finally, we conclude that cities have the unique opportunity to pilot bottom-up participatory approaches and to feed into the process of how a just transition might be pursued at the global level – for example, through their participation in the United Nations Framework for the Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) processes.
The legacies of eugenics in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and their connections to global colonialism remain uncharted. Therefore, it is worth pondering over this relationship, which requires a historical perspective and a repositioning of the recent postcolonial ‘turn’ in CEE to include the history of eugenics. For the most part of the 20th century, eugenics took shape within both colonial and nation-building projects. Eugenic strategies devised to preserve the colonial system outside Europe have always coexisted with programmes designed to improve the well-being of nations within Europe. This convergence between colonial, racial and national dimensions of eugenics requires a critical rethought. While this key line of inquiry has been a major focus in Western Europe and the US, it remains under-theorised in CEE. By highlighting the colonial implications of nation-building in the region, we attempt to destabilise the all-too-pervasive historiographic misconception that CEE nations are largely untouched by the global circulation of eugenics and scientific racism.
ISIS is well known for its brutal mistreatment of those deemed ‘enemies’ and ‘infidels’. In the Kurdistan region of Iraq, having been abducted by ISIS in 2014, many Yazidi women were subjected to different types of violence: sexual, physical and mental. This study investigates how silence was employed by these women as a security strategy to survive their brutal mistreatment under ISIS. The use of silence as a security strategy challenges the assumption that silence is a sign of disempowerment. Drawing on feminist security studies, this study proposes an alternative analysis of security, agency and gendered violence; it demonstrates the need to recognise the complex strategies these Yazidi women developed to resist ISIS rule. It suggests that this approach may be used to critique established narratives about women in the Global South and reveal the under-reported security strategies women employ in conflict settings.
How do lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or trans persons imagine their own ageing in an exclusionary care regime? How does institutionalised exclusion constrain their ability to imagine ageing in a positive light? How, to what extent and by which means can they contest their exclusion from elderly care? This article presents an analysis of a mixed-methods study in Turkey that included 14 focus groups with 139 lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or trans persons in ten cities, and a nationwide online survey with 2,875 respondents. It offers the notion of an exclusionary care regime as a framework for studying care regimes through the lens of marginalised groups, specifically lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or trans persons. Taking Turkey as an example, the article demonstrates that an exclusionary care regime causes respondents to view ageing as a burden. In the absence of progressive socio-political change, lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or trans persons can think of contesting their exclusion from elderly care mostly through market- and asset-based solutions.
Feminist democratic representation is a new design for women’s group representation in electoral politics. We build on the design principles and practices of the 1990s’ presence theorists, who conceived of political inclusion as the presence of descriptive representatives and advocated for gender quota. Our second-generation design foregrounds women’s ideological and intersectional heterogeneity, and details a representative process that enacts three feminist principles: inclusiveness, responsiveness and egalitarianism. A new set of actors – the affected representatives of women – play formal, institutionalised roles in two new democratic practices: group advocacy and account giving. Together, these augmentations incentivise new attitudes and behaviours among elected representatives, and bring about multiple representational effects that redress the poverty of women’s political representation: elected representatives now know more, care more and are more connected to diverse women, including the most marginalised; and the represented are now more closely connected with, more interested in and better represented through democratic politics.
The gender-blind ‘workless’ frame has been increasingly prominent in UK welfare discourse in recent decades and has played a significant role in the political justification of Universal Credit – a key plank of UK welfare reform since 2013. Meanwhile, Universal Credit has been highlighted as problematic for gender equality. This article seeks to ‘fill in the middle’ between the use of the ‘workless’ frame in recent welfare discourse, including at the agenda-setting stage of Universal Credit, and the gendered implications of Universal Credit. It does this by analysing how the frame functions in government evaluation frameworks and impact assessments (including equality impact assessments), and in the implementation of Universal Credit (drawing on secondary analysis of interviews with claimants and focus groups with welfare practitioners). The analysis suggests that the ‘workless’ frame is promoting gender rowback by de-gendering welfare, devaluing care – particularly that performed by lone parents – and undermining the sharing of care in couple households.
International institutions are an essential driving force of contemporary policies to combat gender-based violence but remain toothless if political actors do not implement them in domestic policies. How can scholars conceptualise the transposition of international gender-based violence norms into domestic policies? I argue that discourse network analysis provides a powerful conceptual and methodological extension of critical frame analysis to understand how frames shape the meaning of gender-based violence norms in multi-level institutional contexts. Frames’ normative and cognitive network structure invites combining discourse network and frame analysis techniques that locate frames’ power in their ability to connect different institutional spheres temporally and spatially. I outline a multi-level research agenda that traces the framing processes of international norms and their domestic implementation through gender-based violence policies in the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. This agenda includes avenues to study how complex transnational policy frameworks like the Istanbul Convention play out in domestic policy implementation.
This article aims to understand what happens when gender equality policies cross prison walls – a challenging domain that has traditionally been invisibilised and ignored in the scholarship on gender and politics. By analysing the formulation and post-adoption phases in Spain, four main conclusions are drawn: first, the formulation phase has been highly impacted by the absence of the feminist movement and gender experts, resulting in the adoption of traditional views about the nature and needs of women; second, the lack of knowledge about, or disagreement with, the goals of the public policies activates forms of resistance that block attempts to advance; third, the ideas included in policy documents can be ‘fixed’ in the implementation phase and can eventually shape future courses of action; and, finally, the persistent absence of the feminist movement in the post-adoption phase results in the lack of opportunities to change the course of action towards a more transformative path.
