This paper discusses the work of Japanese painter Nakamura Hiroshi in the late 1950s and early 1960s in light of the politics and literature debate raging among the Japanese intelligentsia in the immediate post-World War II era, focusing specifically on the exchange between Kurahara Korehito and the writers associated with the Kindai bungaku literary journal. A key issue in these debates was that of subjectivity, and this article argues that analyzing Nakamura’s paintings with a focus on this concept reveals how the development of his work was dialectically mediated through the tumultuous political upheavals of the postwar era.

Extensive research has examined whether political satire promotes or suppresses political discussion, but far less attention has been paid to how it shapes discourse quality. This study investigates the impact of political satire on discourse quality by scrutinizing the substance of online discussions in a non-democratic context. Drawing on manual content analysis of discussions on a major Chinese social media platform surrounding China’s controversial policy to raise the age of retirement, we analysed original posts and subsequent replies (N = 3,400) to assess the impact of satire on online political talk. The results show that political satire significantly decreases topic relevance and rationality, while exerting no significant effect on civility, and virtually precludes argument reciprocity. These findings contribute theoretically by shifting the focus from whether satire stimulates political engagement to how it influences the substantive quality of deliberation. They also invite a reassessment of the often-overemphasized optimistic role of political satire, highlighting its potential to erode rational and constructive discourse.

This article examines the fate of the Soviet community in North Korea, arguing that its trajectory closely mirrored the evolving relationship between the Soviet Union and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Between the 1940s and the 1990s, Moscow-Pyongyang relations transformed from quasi-colonial Soviet dominance in the late 1940s to Pyongyang’s successful assertion of political independence in the mid-1950s, followed by antagonism in the 1960s and 1970s, a thaw in the mid-1980s, and, finally, a decline into insignificance from the 1990s to the early 2020s. Similarly, the Soviet community shifted from a position of political influence to a marginalized group that eventually disappeared altogether.

The narrative begins with the community’s formation following the Soviet occupation of North Korea in 1945 and traces its evolution through the shifting geopolitical landscape of the Cold War. The article explores the roles of various subgroups within the community—Soviet administrators, ethnic Koreans with Soviet citizenship, and ordinary Soviet citizens—highlighting the unique social and political challenges each faced under the Kim regime. It examines the community’s decline in the late 1950s as Kim Il-sung consolidated power, expelling Soviet advisers and enforcing naturalization policies that compelled most members of this group to abandon their Soviet ties or endure severe discrimination.

Drawing on recently declassified Russian archival documents, the article provides a fresh empirical perspective and offers a periodization of the community’s history. In doing so, it sheds light on a little-known aspect of Soviet-North Korean relations and the broader dynamics of post-colonial transitions.

The Rohingya refugee crisis, a major humanitarian tragedy in contemporary global politics, has gradually precipitated major security challenges to Bangladesh and other states. This paper employs the Copenhagen School’s securitization theory to examine how securitization, especially by the Bangladeshi government and media, has framed these challenges as existential threats. It makes two basic contributions to existing literature on the Rohingya crisis. Firstly, it provides a theory-informed analysis of the security dimensions of the crisis, considering the interplay between the refugee crisis and national and regional security dynamics. Secondly, the paper explores how the refugees securitize their current plight. Empirically, the study utilizes interview data from 60 local residents, law enforcement agencies, and employees of local and international NGOs. The discussion suggests the possibilities and limitations of the securitization theory in the field of refugee or forced migration studies in the Global South.

Most literature on tawa’ifs remains confined to specific princely states or cities in colonial India. Making ‘travel’ its central framework, this article tries to bring the movement and mobilities of tawa’ifs into sharper focus. Engaging with the formidable research that has emerged since the publication of Veena Oldenburg’s essay on the Lucknow tawa’ifs in 1990, I propose we approach their travels as itinerant subjects through a nuanced framework that distinguishes between the different types of journeys they undertake. Turning our focus on the trajectories and movements of tawa’ifs, I shall argue, makes room for more embedded and rigorous histories of women performers in late colonial India. A conceptual attempt, this article explores the possibilities of locating performers as subjects within complex networks of travel and mobilities. This peripatetic aspect of tawa’ifs’ lives will hence become visible as distinct types of mobilities—journeys of migration; travel in search of sustenance and patronage; types of displacement; exploitative circuits of exhibitions and displays; and in most cases, a crucial means of identity-making. In this article, tawa’ifs’ travels will thus move between princely courts, towns, cities, and regions, and even across continents.

This article considers a long-term stand-off between two forms of governance. Until the very end of British rule in India and Burma, a cluster of small polities effectively held imperialism at bay. Despite being surrounded, they remained independent and self-governing (in British parlance: ‘unadministered’) up until the eve of the Second World War. They have so far been overlooked in the historiography, and yet these rugged hills provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the limits of empire in the India-Burma borderlands. The martial Zo (‘Shendu’) inhabitants and their guerrilla tactics matched British aggression and bred anxiety in border officials. The British remained largely ignorant about this region. Under the restrictions of an imperial non-intervention policy, they could not enter it. This policy was inspired by the calculation that conquering these inaccessible mountains might cost more than it would yield in head tax and forest products. The result was a geopolitical rarity: an obstinate island of indigenous governance, cultural continuity, and micro-warfare enclosed by imperial territories.

This article focuses on the British annexation of the Dai territories in the border zone of Qing China and Burma in the late nineteenth century. It investigates the coercive force used by the British to secure control of the territory and its people, which was asserted on the basis of having had tributary relations with the earlier kingdom of Burma. In this case, I argue that the use of violence as a means to an end is better understood when separated into the mutually reinforcing forms of armed and bureaucratic violence. In these two forms, violent force shaped a practice—a mode of operation—that facilitated and secured British governance in the large territories separating the Chinese Qing state from British Burma. The article is part of a larger investigation that connects British operations on the empire’s much-varied northeastern frontier from the Brahmaputra eastwards into Yunnan, in two periods of its expansion in the early and late nineteenth century.

Internal security has been a governance priority under Xi Jinping. How does China’s budget reflect this prioritization? This research report presents updated data on China’s internal security spending, 1992–2022, revealing a mix of continuity and change. Domestic security expenditure continues to rise, more than doubling from 2012 to 2022, but has risen mostly in proportion to the People’s Republic of China’s overall expenditure. The balance between central and local expenditure has shifted further towards local spending, which, in the context of rising local fiscal constraint, may increase pressure on local public security bureaus. The Ministry of Public Security continues to receive the largest share of domestic security spending, while the proportion of internal security spending allocated to the People’s Armed Police (PAP) has decreased, probably reflecting the reorganization of the PAP in 2017–2018. Spending per capita and relative to GDP continues to be higher in locations that are politically sensitive, including Beijing, Tibet and Xinjiang.

This Forum focuses on the many and diverse smaller polities in a region spanning lands from Bengal and Assam in the west to Yunnan in the east, and from the eastern Himalayas in the north to Thailand in the south. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, these polities underwent dramatic transformations when they faced the impact of Chinese and European encroachments. The ambition of this Forum is to reconnect academic research across the region. Even though this may be a new field of study for contemporary scholars, it is one that the smaller polities actively shaped long before the imperial onslaught. It is diverse, yet tied together by a multitude of interconnections, mobility, and integration through kinship, exchange, shared experiences, and warfare. Scholars of this region, who still work mostly from separate area-studies perspectives, face a challenge. The task ahead is to reconnect their conversations.