Critical scholars and intellectuals are often viewed as vanguards of intellectual rigor, moral integrity, and left-leaning/left-liberal politics. In particular, their trajectories tend to be examined from a sympathetic lens: as supporters of lower-class social movements. Unfortunately, this approach overlooks the varied agency of these critical scholars and their complex relationship with the very movements that they often claim to represent. It obscures their potentially unequal socioeconomic status and cultural gap with the movements they engage with. This is not to dismiss their contribution or deny the reality of state repression against some of them, but a more grounded, sober approach to studying these cognitive workers is needed.

This study investigates the value-appropriating, politically-moderating, status-seeking tendency in some parts of critical knowledge production and activism. It advances several claims. First, the increasing neoliberalisation of the research sector exacerbates the process of class differentiation among critical scholars and intellectuals. The majority join the swelling rank of precarious cognitariat, whereas a selected stratum becomes part of the professional managerial class. Second, the latter stratum contains new intellectual actors who enjoy economic, cultural, and, political benefits from their advantaged position at the expense of precarious scholar-activists and marginalised communities, as exemplified in their public celebrity status or appointment into policymaking decisions. Lastly, as an illustration, and a form of self-criticism, I interrogate my position as an early-career researcher of Indonesian politics, show my own role and complicity in the neoliberal research industrial complex, and reflect on possible ways out of this politico-intellectual impasse.

Two members of the United States Congress, Representative Lane Evans (D-Illinois) and Representative Chris Smith (R-New Jersey), have introduced a non-binding resolution (H.Res. 759) in the current congressional session which calls on the government of Japan to “formally acknowledge and accept responsibility for its sexual enslavement of young women” during the 1930s and 40s.

StopAsianHate protests arose in the West during the COVID-19 pandemic, opposing a perceived increase in hate incidents directed against Asians in general and Chinese people in particular. These events raise a question: what is the nature of attitudinal biases about Chinese people in the English-speaking world today? Here, we seek answers with AI and big data. Using BERT language models pre-trained on massive English-language corpora (books, news articles, Wikipedia, Reddit and Twitter) and a new method for measuring natural-language propositions (the Fill-Mask Association Test, FMAT), we examined three components of attitudinal biases about Chinese people: stereotypes (cognitive beliefs), prejudice (emotional feelings) and discrimination (behavioural tendencies). The FMAT uncovered relative semantic associations between Chinese people and (1) cognitive stereotypes of low warmth (less moral/trustworthy and less sociable/friendly) and somewhat low competence (less assertive/dominant but equally capable/intelligent); (2) affective prejudice of contempt (vs admiration); and (3) behavioural discrimination of active/passive harm (vs help/cooperation). These findings advance our understanding of attitudinal biases towards Chinese people in the English-speaking world.

Based on excerpts from the author’s book, Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019), this article explores the passage and early implementation of Japan’s infamous prewar law, the Peace Preservation Law (Chianijihō). Enacted in March 1925, this law was utilized to arrest over 70,000 people in the Japanese metropole and tens of thousands more in Japan’s colonial territories until being repealed by order of Allied Occupation authorities in October 1945. Proponents initially explained that the law was to suppress communists and anticolonial activists for threatening the national polity, although how to exactly define such threats remained ambiguous. By the 1930s the purview of the law expanded and was used to detain academics, other activists, and members of religious groups who were seen as challenging imperial orthodoxy. This article focuses on the interpretive debates over the law’s central category—kokutai, or national polity—and how its interpretation started to transform as the law was first applied in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The occasion of the Peace Preservation Law’s centennial invites us to consider its history and legacy, especially as policing and state power have expanded since the so-called war on terror.

This study examines the historical evolution of a Companion report detailing the burning of an unnamed man as punishment for assuming the passive role in male–male anal intercourse (liwāṭ). The genesis of this sexual passivity report can be traced back to an earlier incident involving Abū Bakr, in which the apostate al-Fujāʾa al-Salamī (d. 11/632) was executed by being burned alive for multiple offences, including apostasy, betrayal, and the slaughter of Muslims. This study investigates the transformation of the apostasy report into one specifically addressing male sexual passivity, analysing how these two accounts converged over time. It explores both the mechanisms and motivations behind their evolution into a punitive report focused on burning a man for his passive sexual role in liwāṭ. Additionally, it considers potential reasons for the development of this report, including the possibility that the phrase “he was penetrated like a woman” was initially used as a rhetorical insult directed at the apostate al-Fujāʾa, but gradually evolved in later sources into an association with the crime for which an unnamed man was purportedly punished with burning.

The haunting sounds of shakuhachi music and poet Lawson Inada's resonant narration underscore the powerful emotional and moral reverberations of the Ina family's American diasporan story, told in Dr. Satsuki Ina's evocative documentary, From a Silk Cocoon. The film describes her father's upbringing as a kibei, a Japanese-American educated in Japan; his hastened return to the United States because of parental fear that he would be drafted into the Imperial Japanese military; his marriage to a beautiful kibei, born in Seattle and educated in Nagano; and the profound damage perpetrated by the U.S. government on the young couple during their devastating four years of incarceration during the Second World War because of their ethnic heritage. The Inas spent two years at Topaz Internment Camp, in Utah before they were separated and Satsuki Ina's father was sent to a Department of Justice internment camp in Bismarck, North Dakota with other so-called “enemy aliens” while Ina, her mother, and brother were sent to Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison for those who either refused or said “no” to a loyalty questionnaire.

This paper aims to analyze the impact of the Incidental Process activated during the UNESCO Memory of the World (MOW) 2022/23 nomination cycle and the Memory of the World Regional Committee for Asia and the Pacific (MOWCAP) 2021/22 nomination cycle. The Incidental Process is a mechanism that allows a Member State to contest nominations submitted by other Member States in the inscription process of the MOW Register. Japan became the first Member State to initiate the Incidental Process in 2022, contesting five nominations submitted by Korea and China. Japan’s initiative, seemingly part of its decade-long campaign, concentrated on identifying the elements in the nominated documents that would evoke the image of perpetrators and removing them from inscription. However, the MOW and MOWCAP responded in different ways to the contestation, which highlighted several contentious issues that were not effectively addressed by the General Guidelines. Furthermore, the disputes surrounding Japan’s contestation revealed the institutional weakness of the International Advisory Committee (IAC), the main operational body of the program. This paper, after examining the extraordinary situations that arose during the MOW and MOWCAP inscription process, attempts to identify the origin of the contentious issues and suggests the need to implement the provisions of the Incidental Process for the future operation of the MOW.

This article examines the legal framework for offshore CO2 sequestration in South Korea, paying particular attention to how to ensure the protection of the marine environment from CO2 sequestration in sub-seabed geological formations. It analyses the relevant international regulatory framework, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the 1972 London Convention and the 1996 London Protocol. It then examines the Korean national legal framework relating to offshore CO2 sequestration. In the absence of detailed regulations on the process of CO2 sequestration in sub-seabed geological formations in South Korea, the article suggests detailed regulations regarding site selection, assessment of potential risks, monitoring and long-term liability to ensure environmental safety and security from offshore CO2 sequestration, which should comply with the 1996 Protocol and relevant guidelines. The development of detailed Korean national regulations ensuring compliance with international rules and standards could serve as best practices driving offshore CCS in the Asia-Pacific region.