Politics and International Relations - Research

Why do top-down reforms to public services so often over-promise and under-deliver? Using five concepts from psychology, economics and organisational sociology and diverse examples of successes and failures, Thomas Elston addresses this pressing question of good governance.

Featuring contributions from around the world, this edited collection provides a comprehensive account of unarmed civilian protection (UCP). It brings together a wide range of UCP practices and provides an important illustration of the contributions UCP can make, while also discussing its limitations and failures.

Based on the findings of a major research project, this book investigates how European societies confront their troubled pasts. The text explores what measures can be taken and which strategies endorsed to overcome difficult historic legacies in seven European states, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Cyprus and Poland.

Exploring the relationship between humour and offensiveness, this book delves into offensive jokes, their impact, and the dark side of laughter. It blends cultural analysis, politics, and philosophy to offer an antidote to positive thinking and guide readers through offensive humour.

Based on a multidisciplinary analytical framework, it explains why and how some peripheral cities have become the locus of violent orders, whereas others have managed to control violence, and to examine the role of violence in the workings of local governance.

Matthew Quinn plots a landmark reimagination of governance and public administration, underpinned by sustainable development and civic republicanism.

This book sets out how people’s lives can be positively transformed through diverse forms of community involvement. It shows how communities can become more collaborative and resilient in dealing with the problems they face and provides a guide to what a holistic policy agenda for community-based transformation should encompass.

This edited collection explores areas such as social enterprise, capacity building, volunteering and social value, and charts the historical development of the state-third sector relationship, reviewing the major debates and controversies accompanying recent shifts in that relationship.

Carrie Manning’s illuminating book examines how policies to limit taxation at state and local levels in the US have direct and lasting consequences for equity, accountability, and ultimately for democracy.

First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this book makes a statement about the study of policy and politics: what it is, how it is done, where it has been and where it is going. It comprises scholarship that has rarely been combined to explore several fundamental challenges about research in policy and politics.

This short book explores Sweden’s response to the global pandemic and the wave of controversies it triggered. It helps to make sense of the response by defining ‘a Swedish model’ that incorporates the country’s value system and offers a case study for understanding the ways in which different national approaches to the pandemic have been compared.

Moving beyond state-centric and elitist perspectives, this volume examines everyday security in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and written by scholars from Central Asia and beyond, it shows how insecurity is experienced, what people consider existential threats, and how they go about securing themselves.