Kōmei School was the first public school for children with physical disabilities in Japan and emerged from reformist, child-centered influences during the 1920s to early 1930s. This work examines the school’s history to reveal the place of children with disabilities in Japan’s compulsory school system. Administrative exemptions for decades blocked children with disabilities from “compulsory” education, denying them access to school. Kōmei School was established to provide opportunities to a few of many young Japanese individuals with physical challenges and proved to be a source of innovation. However, “abled” Japanese schoolchildren in compulsory schools were considered future national resources, and children with disabilities were not. Consequently, abled pupils were evacuated from Tokyo and other cities to safety in the 1944 mass evacuation policy, while Kōmei’s children with mobility challenges were abandoned to face air raids in Tokyo. Under a regime that assessed children as nascent military resources, the nationality of Kōmei’s pupils was denied, and even their humanity was questioned. After the war, children with physical disabilities remained devalued by the rapidly growing economy. As a result, the designation “compulsory” that would secure their right to an education, require their attendance in school, and guarantee that government would assure their place in school was not codified until 1979.

Indonesia’s population skews young, so political analysts are increasingly concerned with what the “youth vote” looks like, and what generational change will bring to Indonesia’s democracy. On the one hand, analysts have historically focused on the liberal political activism of more educated cohorts of young people, and especially those in urban areas. On the other, and most recently, young Indonesians overwhelmingly voted for Prabowo Subianto in the 2024 presidential elections, suggesting this cohort to be either unaware of, or unperturbed by, his authoritarian history. This paper examines how young Indonesians perceive their country’s democratic trajectory. We analyze two decades of nationally representative survey data, and examine the democratic preferences of Indonesian voters whose political socialization took place entirely in the post-authoritarian era (1998–). The results suggest both life-cycle and intriguing cohort effects: on average, Indonesians become more positive towards their democracy as they age; but we also find that Indonesia’s Gen Zs are more satisfied with democracy than other generational cohorts—despite a precipitous decline in the quality of Indonesian democracy over the past decade. We argue, therefore, that while all Indonesians show high levels of satisfaction with their weakening democracy, young Indonesians, more than other generations, can be understood as ‘complacent democrats.’

China’s gun-free society is maintained through a paradox—while the state’s disciplinary apparatus unmakes any exceptions to the norm by continuously disarming the wayward, it simultaneously perpetuates exaggerated narratives of threats posed by clandestine gun makers in the ethnic frontier regions. This article investigates the state’s construction of Hualong, in Northwest China’s Qinghai, as ‘the capital of China’s ghost guns’. By debunking the quasi-historical claim that Hualong was a major firearms manufacturing hub in the early twentieth century, the article reveals how the modern Chinese state uses this narrative to reinforce an ethnopolitical reset—placing the Han in exclusive control of both firearms’ regulation and the sovereign right to punish violators. Drawing on multiple archival sources, the article argues that monoethnic control of arms was a central tenet of twentieth-century ethnic nationalism. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that early twentieth-century Qinghai was adept in taking advantage of the mobility and fluidity of arms afforded by a trans-imperial infrastructure in its state-making enterprise. That infrastructure included Western missionary networks, treaty ports and foreign concessions inherited from the late Qing, a revitalized maritime hajj route, Japanese imperialism, as well as an expansionist Chinese nationalism struggling to find a foothold in the former empire’s legacy frontiers.

This article examines the Indonesian Constitutional Court’s use of international law in its decisions between 2003 and 2023, when it referred to international legal instruments in approximately 10% of its constitutional review cases. However, it has not clearly explained why or how it uses international law. The article develops a typology of the Court’s use of international law, categorising it into four areas: bolstering domestic law, interpreting domestic law, rejecting international law, and misconstruing international law. The Court primarily uses international law to support or confirm domestic constitutional and statutory provisions, especially when they are similar (or universal, as the Court sometimes observes). However, the Court sometimes uses international law to interpret domestic law, and occasionally, it even appears to misconstrue international law to reach a desired outcome. We conclude that, if anything, the Court practices pragmatic dualism, rather than pragmatic monism, as Palguna and Wardana argued in this Journal in 2024.