Propagandists discredit political ideas that rival their own. In China’s state-run media, one common technique is to place the phrase so-called, in English, or 所谓, in Chinese, before the idea to be discredited. In this research note we apply quantitative text analysis methods to over 45,000 Xinhua articles from 2003 to 2022 containing so-called or 所谓 to better understand the ideas the government wishes to discredit for different audiences. We find that perceived challenges to China’s sovereignty consistently draw usage of the term and that a theme of rising importance is political rivalry with the United States. When it comes to differences between internal and external propaganda, we find broad similarities, but differences in how the US is discredited and more emphasis on cooperation for foreign audiences. These findings inform scholarship on comparative authoritarian propaganda and Chinese propaganda specifically.

In this paper, I marked the critical alter-political works of urban scholar-activists in the Philippines. Slums are at the heart of capitalist dispossessions. Slumdwellers live, survive, negotiate, and resist on an everyday basis. In the Philippines, the struggles of slum community organisations are strongly influenced, formed, and pulled in divergent ideological trajectories by contending larger political formations.

I draw on my own experience and that of 20 Filipino urban scholar-activists with varied political commitments, reflecting on decades of community work, to highlight the alter-works and challenges of navigating the web of political heterogeneity within urban poor organisations and movements. By scholar-activists, I do not refer solely to those who are based in universities, but to the many who struggle every day to unearth subaltern political knowledges and collectively fight for the right to adequate housing, as well as, for some, the right to the city. I enumerate the multiple functions and necessary labours of being 'embedded' in these complex politics. We engage in political advising, framing, networking, organizing, translating, and capacity-building. Caught in a complex web that may necessitate strategic essentialisation, silencing, and foreclosures, scholar-activists play a crucial role of strategic facilitation that connects collective forms of living among urban surplus lives and corrodes neoliberal urban dispossessions. These alter-works are continuous efforts towards situated solidarities, where urban scholar activists critically draw from and reshape ‘inherited’ social movement frames and strategies grounded on actually existing subaltern realities, capacities, and political opportunities.

This article focuses on a case study of one Japanese prefectural association and its monthly magazine to reassess the importance of prefectural associations (kenjinkai) beyond the diaspora communities in North America on which Anglophone scholarly focus has remained until now. It also returns an overlooked imperial dimension to Japanese language histories of domestic prefectural associations and discourse over the ‘hometown’. Arguing that the expansive ideas of the hometown, created through the networks of prefectural associations and the pages of their publications, gave rise to ideas of borderless empire and frictionless mobility, this article demonstrates how histories of prefectural associations and magazines like Fukuoka kenjin present a new, regional perspective on both empire and the idea of the hometown in pre-war Japan. Associationalism in and beyond Japan’s empire was not unique, and this article puts the history of kenjinkai in conversation with other such regional settler networks around the globe that were happening at the same time. The article then looks at the transwar continuities and ruptures felt by overseas associations in both North America and among former Japanese colonists, before contextualizing the rise of a ‘third wave’ of domestic migration and hometown discourse in the 1960s.

Recent discussions among historians, jurists, and political scientists have increasingly centred on the effectiveness of the Laws of Armed Conflict in safeguarding legally protected groups such as civilians and prisoners of war. Central to this debate is the question of how a state’s public commitment to international law aligns with the actual conduct of its armed forces in combat zones. This article contributes to the discourse by examining the Boxer War in China (1900–1901), during which seven Western powers and Japan opposed an anti-foreign Chinese sect supported by military forces loyal to the Qing court. The analysis focuses on the legal stance of five key members of the anti-Boxer coalition—Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and Japan—and evaluates the conduct of their troops towards Chinese civilians and prisoners. Particular attention is given to Japan, offering insights into how the application of the international laws of war is shaped not only by the expectations of belligerents and their adversaries, as prominent scholars have suggested, but also by the dynamics among allies, including competition, as well as by each belligerent’s unique history and cultural context. This nuanced perspective highlights the interplay of legal commitments, alliance politics, and national identity in determining the behaviour of military forces during wartime.

The article highlights the role of partisan ethnography in studying the chains of co-optation of grassroots environmental activism in ecologically and politically sensitive contexts. In Thailand, such chains are often undergoing the process of institutionalization of eco-Buddhist approaches to nature conservation, also concurring with the detachment of grassroots socio-environmental activism from the recent, urban based pro-democracy uprisings. The discussion will focus on the recent history of the eco-politics related to natural resources conservation in the Nan River Basin (Northern Thailand). It will describe how, since the 1980s, eco-Buddhist NGOs, Royal think tanks, international cooperation organizations, and corporate C.S.E.R. programs, which comply with the latter agencies, have systematically tended to manipulate pioneer, grassroots eco-political imagination and the organisational know-how of local environmental activists. These powerful institutional actors demonstrated interest in the Buddhist moralization of local ecological beliefs and praxis as a strategy to afford privileges of access to land, water, and forest resources through forms of internal “green grabbing”. At stake here is the fact that, beyond the grabbing of Thai river basins’ contested landscapes, activists’ radical imaginations and alter-political practices – an intangible component of such landscapes - are subject to a form of intellectual and political grabbing. The anthropological enterprise and the ethnographic encounter, conceived as partisan collaboration, nevertheless show that forms of patient resistance to such structural dynamics of co-optation might also express an unexpected source for the creative rearticulation of dissent and alter-political imaginations.