This article contains editions of three new copperplate charters of the kings of Valkhā who, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries ce, ruled a territory situated to the north of the Vākāṭaka kingdom along the Narmadā river. Ramesh and Tewari, the editors of the famous Bagh hoard of plates discovered in 1982, furnished a straightforward chronology of five successive Valkhā rulers on the basis of 32 plates known to them. However, one of the plates edited here flatly contradicts the sequence they proposed. It turns out that the dating of several previously known Valkhā charters is also controversial. It has been suggested by other scholars that there were, in fact, two kings of Valkhā by the name of Rudradāsa as well as two by the name of Bhuluṇḍa. A reinvestigation of old data combined with the newly edited plates confirms the former and shows a high likelihood of the latter.

This article introduces “CALL4,” a bilingual (Japanese and English) website created in 2019 to bring attention to public interest cases litigated in Japan’s courts. The open-access CALL4 website (https://www.call4.jp/) is designed to both stimulate public interest and raise money for litigation costs through crowdfunding. It presently covers more than 80 cases. CALL4 has become a standard reference for news reporters, lawyers, and others concerned with public interest cases. The site has also raised significant funding. This article profiles the founders and their strategies for reaching a broad audience to support public interest cases, including a significant reliance on student volunteers.

Discussions on populism in Japan have often been overlooked in the comparative politics literature. However, as theoretical and empirical discussions progress, the need for more Japanese contributions to expand observers’ understanding of the global populist phenomenon is evident now more than ever. The sudden rise of Ishimaru Shinji as a populist figure in the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election sparked claims that “social media populism” has arrived in Japan. However, although social media certainly played a role in propelling Ishimaru’s popularity during his campaign, limiting considerations of populism to election campaign performances overlooks a greater question: What happens when populists are elected? This article suggests that the Ishimaru phenomenon needs to be contextualized with examples of distinct practices of populist governors. This article argues that, in a neoliberal era of “political reform” (seiji kaikaku) populist political entrepreneurs have introduced “innovations” to governing practices as a way to personalize the executive in pursuit of their policy agendas. Specifically, three governing practices of the populist governors Hashimoto Tōru and Koike Yuriko are identified and considered as a “populist playbook” from which Ishimaru, and future populists, will likely borrow.

This is an extended review of Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) that addresses several important issues in the methodology of historical Arabic linguistics.

This special issue, “On Their Own Terms: Experts in Imperial China,” examines various kinds of expertise from Han times into the twentieth century from the angle of practitioners themselves, and sometimes even on their own terms.

In the final decades of its existence, the Qing imperial state sought to unify and standardize policies of frontier management. In this context, mapping and surveying practices developed as socio-technological discourses that transformed how Qing authorities asserted their territorial claims in the Eastern Himalayas. Most scholarship on the history of Qing-era frontier management has tended to focus on Chinese nation-building practices. However, this article foregrounds the deconstruction of the epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about the Eastern Himalayas by investigating the appropriation and rejection of the interlocutors of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors.

How did military surveyors establish authoritative ideas about their own expertise? This article focuses on the late-Qing surveys of the Dzayul river basin commissioned by Zhao Erfeng and carried out by his subordinate officials Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu. Between 1910 and 1911, Zhao Erfeng ordered new surveys of the regions located at the north-easternmost tip of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, to demarcate the Qing Tibetan dominions and Chinese territory from that of British India. The surveyors Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu, mapped the route of the Dzayul River which flowed into British Indian territory through the Mishmi hills into Assam as the Lohit. These surveys largely claimed that natural features marked the “natural” or “traditional” boundaries of the imperial state, against local knowledge productions that framed those same topographical features as connectors rather than dividers. By dissembling the various strands that informed this archive of Qing colonial knowledge, I investigate the processes by which state-produced narratives created new kinds of citational practices to designate who could be recognized as an “expert” of the mountainous geography of Tibet and the trans-Himalayan regions.

This article studies the origins of Jafr, an apocalyptic, eschatological and occult book attributed to the first Shiʿi imam, ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (d. 661). While it remains unclear whether Jafr was ever physically composed, it became associated with lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) in medieval Sunni and Shiʿi literature. Jafr gradually evolved into a crucial component of Islamic occult traditions and influenced various cosmological theories as well as the letter-magic practices of prominent Sunni and Shiʿi occultists. Despite its historical significance, confusion regarding Jafr’s roots, authorship and content in Shiʿi sources from the third to fifth centuries ah persists in scholarship. This article examines various aspects of Jafr in early Shiʿi tradition and sheds light on its status as a key text of messianism, prognostication and apocalypticism.

In 1932, Khana Ratsadon (the People’s Party) overthrew the absolute monarchy in a military coup, introducing constitutional rule in Siam (Thailand after 1939). The dominant historical narrative in Thailand centres on the monarchy as the instigator of historical change, celebrating the roles of Thai monarchs in the development and protection of democracy. According to this narrative, democracy is portrayed as the monarchy’s gift to the people, while the significance of the 1932 revolution and Khana Ratsadon has been marginalized in the history of the origins of democracy in Thailand. Since the military coups in Thailand in 2006 and 2014, both original and newly created objects related to Khana Ratsadon have emerged in political protests against coups and post-coup governments. Simultaneously, a revisionist historiography has gained momentum. This article explores how the discursive and material (re)emergence of Khana Ratsadon contributes to the formation of a counter-memory, creating a space for political commentary to enact and reimagine the possibilities of community anew. In doing so, the article will examine the intricate relationship between a historiography of oblivion, counter-memory, and what we term ‘banal and revolutionary objects’.

Does increasing descriptive representation enhance substantive representation? While ethnic minorities are generally underrepresented in legislatures worldwide, they are overrepresented in China’s National People’s Congress. We show that overrepresentation of ethnic legislators does not result in greater substantive representation. Compared to their Han counterparts, ethnic minority legislators are less likely to sponsor bills, show no significant difference in submitting policy suggestions, and are reticent to propose legislation on ethnic issues. They face challenges in mobilizing sufficient signatures for bill sponsorship within delegations and in building cross-delegation policy coalitions. Ethnic fragmentation may hinder their ability to advance the policy agenda. Our findings suggest that institutional constraints and collective action problems may hinder ethnic legislators from achieving substantive representation.