This article offers a counter-reading of the Ghaznavid panegyric that resists reducing its idiom of praise to an effect of political legitimation, as dominant accounts of the genre have done. By highlighting how two panegyrics, one by ʿUnṣurī and the other by Farrukhī, subvert the aesthetic-didactic expectations surrounding praise born from Islamicate rhetorical and poetic theory, it contends that Persian panegyric poetry does not transparently deploy praise. To this end, the article first proposes four structures of praise that render praise both legible and susceptible to ironizing: evidentiary agreement, intradistich agreement, interdistich agreement, and metapoetic balance. A subsequent analysis of ʿUnṣurī and Farrukhī’s panegyrics reveals how ostensibly laudatory claims can ironize these structures to produce effects of delegitimation, rather than legitimation, while maintaining a posture of praise.

Public opinion has become an increasingly consequential force in shaping international relations, with perceptions of China standing at the center of debates across East Asia. Notably, while youth in South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia tend to hold more negative views of China than their elders, Japan presents a reverse pattern: younger generations display higher affinity toward China compared to older generations. This paper investigates the sources of this divergence using 2023 survey data from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. Building on generational cohort theory and collective memory, the paper redefines Japanese generational groupings and applies regression analysis to identify the key drivers of affinity toward China. The results show that younger Japanese cohorts, though highly curious and actively consuming China-related information, exhibit limited knowledge of China’s political and social structures and display weaker attentiveness to political dimensions. By contrast, older cohorts anchor their perceptions in political memory and bilateral disputes, leading to increasingly entrenched disillusionment. These findings suggest that Japan’s generational gap reflects internal variations in cognitive socialization rather than an overall warming of bilateral relations, underscoring the need to closely monitor evolving youth perceptions in the years ahead.

This paper examines how well news articles reflect levels of interstate cooperation, focusing on cooperation between the Japanese and the South Korean governments. The study analyzes events from news articles on Japan–Republic of Korea (ROK) government cooperation from the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) 2.0 Event Database, a global catalog of weighted interstate events. Results reveal that news articles reflect major events of Japan–ROK government cooperation from 2015 to 2024. A few examples of cooperation not represented were found when conflict or past cooperation was reported simultaneously. This study highlights the complexity of Japan–ROK government cooperation and reveals the challenges of using news articles for event data generation.

Despite the expansion of research on South Asian courtesans, there has been no attempt at a critical historiography on courtesans alone. Within this larger gap, the specific connections between travel, mobility, and female performers in South Asia have not been adequately theorised. By making a critical intervention into the historiography of courtesans, we hope to aid in the establishment of what could be termed ‘South Asian courtesan studies’ as a recognised field of scholarship. Foregrounding the historical method for research into courtesans, the articles here show that beyond conventional ethnographic sources, there is a rich textual, visual, and material archive, largely unexplored until recently. They reveal both the transnational and local, and the spectacular and quotidian circuits of female performers’ travels. These include religious sites and participation in rites of passage like weddings but also extend beyond South Asia into the theatre spectacles and exhibitions of Europe. In the context of empire, this volume maps how female performers travelled in local, regional, and transnational contexts, and whether they were able to transcend the hypersexualised colonial trope of the ‘nautch girl’. This special issue offers a sample of the new developments in this growing field to catalyse its further expansion.

This article offers the first systematic assessment of environmental studies (ES) on Turkey over the past decade (2013–2023), situating its development against the backdrop of intensifying ecological crises and shifting academic paradigms. Drawing on a dataset of 585 journal articles and book chapters indexed in the Web of Science, complemented by manual coding and interviews with scholars across disciplines, we map the thematic, methodological, and institutional trajectories of the field. Our findings reveal a significant growth in ES, with climate change, sustainability, and energy emerging as dominant themes, and gender representation among scholars showing relative balance. Yet this expansion is uneven: research remains clustered in a few universities, more reliant on quantitative approaches, and largely shaped by economics, management, and political sciences. Critical perspectives, particularly those engaging grassroots mobilizations, environmental justice, and post-anthropocentric frameworks exist, but cannot dominate. Interviews further highlight the persistent ambivalence of scholars toward ES as a disciplinary identity, raising questions about whether the field is coalescing or persisting as fragmented conversations. By charting both the advances and enduring oversights of ES on Turkey, this study contributes to global debates on the institutionalization of environmental knowledge and points toward more inclusive, interdisciplinary, and justice-oriented futures.

This paper examines the dynamics of religious transformation in North Africa during the second and third centuries AD, challenging traditional narratives rooted in culture-historical models and simplistic cultural labels, such as the purported ‘Africanisation’ of cults under the Severan dynasty. While past scholarship has often framed these changes in terms of cultural permanence, resistance, or renaissance, this study shows that they are instead deeply embedded within the broader social and economic practices of the Roman Empire and, at the same time, reflect local and micro-regional dynamics. The paper adopts a multifold approach to reinterpretation: the onomastic attributes of gods and devotees; the iconography and materiality of divine representations; the architectural forms of temples and their functions. By reanalysing key material corpora, this contribution highlights how cultic patterns were shaped by factors such as economic networks, the proliferation of stone-made monuments, and the involvement of an expanding ‘middle-class’ base of worshippers. A specific focus is placed on the cult of Saturn, often viewed as emblematic of African religious identity or continuity. This study argues instead that the second–third century boom in Saturn worship reflects broader imperial trends, including the rise in monumentalisation and shifting patterns of religious patronage. By dismantling previous assumptions and employing relational and materiality-focused methodologies, the paper offers a revised framework for understanding the interplay between local traditions and imperial dynamics in shaping religious practices in Roman Africa.

This article reconstructs and contextualizes two inscriptions commemorating the Aqquyunlu occupation of Mardin in 835/1432 at the newly built main gate linking the town to the citadel. Inscription 835 Mardin was formerly displayed on three courses of stones in a framed area surmounting the gate facing the town. The gate collapsed at some point in the twentieth century. Due to the inclusion of its former location in the active military base inside Mardin’s citadel, it is unclear whether some of the stones displaying inscription 835 Mardin still exist among the rubble below its former location. Even before the collapse of the gate, the stones of inscription 835 Mardin had been reset out of their original sequence as documented in a unique photograph taken in 1911, which enables the reconstruction presented in this article. The gate surmounted by inscription 835 Mardin was closed with an inscribed monumental lock that was commissioned immediately after the Aqquyunlu occupation of Mardin. This lock was formerly held as #378 in the collection of the Çinili Köşk of the Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi in Istanbul. Notwithstanding repeated inquiries via email and on site with the administration of the museum, it cannot currently be located and appears to have been lost. Accordingly, the edition suggested in the present article builds on an earlier edition by Halil Etem [Eldem] as checked against additional photographs published in other scholarly publications until 1952 and the reconstructed historical and epigraphic context presented in the present article. Together, both inscriptions constitute a unique and coherent epigraphic programme declaring the commitment of the newly established Aqquyunlu administration to rule in accordance with Islamic normativities and the supra-regional standard of the Timurid ruler Shāhrukh, who is named as qara ʿUthmān’s overlord in both inscriptions.