This article critically examines the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) ruling on the preliminary objections in Sudan v. United Arab Emirates, focusing on the implications of the UAE’s reservation to Article IX of the Genocide Convention. It evaluates the Court’s interpretation of the scope and effect of such reservations, contrasting it with precedents set in Bosnia v. Serbia and The Gambia v. Myanmar. Drawing on the ICJ’s jurisprudence, principles of state responsibility, and international criminal law, the article highlights significant tensions and ambiguities in the Court’s approach to admissibility, complicity, and provisional measures. The study incorporates insights from the International Criminal Court and UN Human Rights Council resolutions to contextualise the legal and factual matrix. Ultimately, it argues for a more coherent doctrinal framework to address the impact of reservations on treaty obligations and jurisdictional competence in genocide-related disputes.

This article reconsiders prevailing assumptions of bureaucratic continuity in postwar Japan by examining the case of the Ministry of Communications during the Allied Occupation. While existing scholarship emphasizes institutional inertia, this study shows how structural reform and inter-institutional negotiations involving both American authority and Japanese agency reshaped parts of Japan’s administrative system. The case calls for a more differentiated, organization-focused perspective on postwar reforms and demonstrates that these transformations had enduring effects beyond 1952.

For a plant as renowned and beloved in China as the plum blossom (meihua 梅花), there is conspicuously little written in English about eating it. However, without understanding the historical affection for consuming plum blossoms, our comprehension of it as a cultural icon misses an important dimension. This article explores the intriguing discourse surrounding plum blossom consumption in three sections. The first section introduces the key concept of qing 清 (“purity”) and its relation to the “poet’s spleen” (shiren pi 詩人脾), which provides a theoretical framework for a relationship between eating it and writing poetry. The second section examines Song-dynasty poems on this eating practice, particularly those by Yang Wanli 楊萬里 (1127–1206) and the Rivers and Lakes poets (jianghu shiren 江湖詩人). Their poetry was closely tied to new developments in the notion of qi 氣 and “poetic spleen” (shipi 詩脾). The third section turns to culinary recipes, primarily from the Rivers and Lakes poet Lin Hong 林洪 (fl. 1224–1263), who promotes qing aesthetics in plum blossom dishes. I argue that the discovery of culinary value in a flower long regarded as more symbolic than edible marks a significant development in Song-dynasty (960–1279) literati culture, aesthetics, intellectual history, and medicine.

In this paper, I explore the millennium-long presence of the chickpea in premodern China by highlighting three key historical moments. The legume had its first rise to prominence as a cosmopolitan “Muslim Bean” in the Mongol Yuan (1271–1368) imperial diet. It then experienced a phase of obscurity, as the most renowned Chinese herbalist, Li Shizhen 李時珍 (1518–1593), conflated it with the pea. A disparate identity of the legume emerged around the same time, as the bean garnered attention from famine relief specialists, consequently transforming into a source of sustenance. The multiple lives of the chickpea were characterized with a common emphasis on its foreignness, drawing connections to various Eurasian cultures beyond China. The plant’s enduring presence, coupled with ongoing allusions to its alienness, makes it a perpetual foreigner in the broad expanse of the Chinese empire.

This article examines the tabular presentations in Sima Qian’s Shi ji and Gu Donggao’s Chunqiu dashi biao through the lens of a siege in 630 bce. Recognized as exemplary historical tables of the Spring and Autumn Period, the two tables process historical narratives at both micro and macro levels in an unprecedented manner, aiming to provide a larger picture of general historical trends. By emphasizing a visual and spatial representation of history in its tabular design, the Shi ji table invites the reader to examine the text nonlinearly and to construct a dialectical relationship between it and related narrative chapters. On the other hand, Gu’s text-oriented tables, usually misunderstood as a mere continuation of those in the Shi ji, require a linear reading and cannot directly produce a visual representation of the general patterns of the Spring and Autumn Period. However, to compensate for the lack of a visual overview, Gu composed “impromptu poems” (kouhao), which orally sketch general historical trends, to help beginners memorize the history of the Spring and Autumn Period. This article aims to demonstrate the use of tabulation at the crucial beginning point of Chinese historiography and its reinvention in the late imperial period.