One century ago, US Secretary of State Charles Evan Hughes made the first official statement regarding US policy toward Antarctica by declaring it would not recognise sovereignty in areas that could not actually be settled. The Hughes Doctrine formalised US opposition to countries dividing Antarctica into sovereign territory, a doctrine that has become the bedrock upon which subsequent US decisions toward the region were built. This paper gives a broad overview of the development of US policy toward Antarctica, starting with the Hughes Doctrine, including the period when the United States secretly considered making its own claim to sovereign territory before deciding to champion then maintain the multilateral, sovereign-free region based on the Antarctic Treaty in order to achieve its national goals. This paper also reviews how the policies are working today and considers the significant challenges and costs the United States would incur if it altered its century-old policy toward Antarctica.

We conduct the first modern econometric analysis of the historical deaf population in the United States by incorporating deafness into a model of human capital. We find that the deaf population invested less in observable educational and physical human capital. Lower literacy, employment, and occupational scores also suggest that unobserved human capital investments were not substantial enough to improve productivity to the level of the hearing population. States that subsidized schools for the deaf provided deaf people with improved social capital and access to intangible goods that they pursued at the cost of higher economic achievement. Finally, we argue that substantial lifecycle differences between the hearing and deaf populations have implications for unbiased school attendance and employment rate estimation.

While much scholarly attention has been devoted to analyzing governments' attempts to determine ways of remembering or forgetting the past, little is known about how the politics of remembrance affect the process of reconciliation. To what extent does conflict remembrance actually influence the shaping of collective (national) identities? Does remembering the painful past lead to reconciliation? If not, what does it do? This article addresses these questions by reflecting on the author's experience of teaching multinational groups at her university in Japan, and discussing fraught issues relating to the Asia-Pacific War (including the “comfort women”) with her classes. Drawing on class observations and student essays from 2016 to 2019, she discusses the often conflicting narratives and identities that students bring to the university classroom and the pedagogical challenges involved in negotiating these. The paper illustrates how highly selective narratives of the national past (learnt at school or absorbed from the media) affect collective identity (the way we perceive the self versus the other), and discusses implications for East Asian reconciliation and peace.

Japan's attitude towards Okinawa during the Meiji and Taishō periods defied concrete definition. Although nominally a prefecture, Okinawa retained a semi-colonial status for two decades after its annexation in 1879. Despite the fact that Okinawan people accepted Japanese rule with little resistance, which ultimately turned into active support for the assimilation policy, Japanese policy makers never lost their distrust of Okinawan people. Similarly, Japanese society did not fully embrace them, perceiving them as backward and inferior, and even questioning their Japanese-ness. The experience of discrimination strengthened the Okinawan people's motivation to fight for recognition as true Japanese citizens. Local intellectuals, such as historian Iha Fuyū, embarked on a mission to prove that Okinawa was and always had been Japanese.

From a certain perspective, Okinawan modern history falls into the paradigm of colonization or integration under the Japanese nation-state. The crucial clue to understanding Okinawa's case lies in the fact that it was a poor country, with little natural resources to offer. Unlike Hokkaido, there was no mass migration from mainland Japan to Okinawa. Unlike Taiwan and Korea, Okinawa did not attract skillful and ambitious administrators. Accordingly, Okinawa was turned neither into a model colony, nor a modern prefecture, but remained a forgotten and abandoned region.

This essay summarizes my argument in The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia. The history problem is essentially a relational phenomenon that arises when nations promote self-serving versions of the past by focusing on what happened to their own citizens with little regard for foreign others. East Asia, however, has recently also witnessed the emergence of a cosmopolitan form of commemoration taking humanity, rather than nationality, as its primary frame of reference. When cosmopolitan commemoration is practiced as a collective endeavor by both perpetrators and victims, a resolution of the history problem will finally become possible.

This article assesses local tensions that plague the U.S.-centered hub-and-spokes security framework in the Western Pacific region, which finds its most concrete expression in increasingly vulnerable legacy installations. I start by considering how people living outside the fence in places like Guam and Okinawa have tended to see the U.S. military, while summarizing global trends in U.S. base expansion and contraction outside of the continental United States (OCONUS). I tie this past to the most common dilemmas of global basing manifesting today, explain how these dilemmas have been understood, and highlight core concerns undergirding most base protest cultures. In the absence of sweeping policy changes to legal structures that disenfranchise militarized civilians in the most heavily fortified islands in the U.S. global base network, changing the way recent history is represented at U.S. controlled public sites could catalyze meaningful change within perennially troubled relationships between the U.S. military and overburdened host communities.

There has been limited research on African policy instruments’ historical and institutional nature in health policy literature. However, in the field of health systems research, there are many examples that show the permanent use of financing instruments inspired by liberal (pro-market) ideas such as user fees, performance bonuses, or private practice of medicine in Africa. Through an analysis of archives (1840–1960), this article shows the presence of these instruments in the health system during the French colonial period in Senegal. Thus, this study shows that these financing policy instruments’ institutional presence and longevity are part of a liberal approach that predates international organizations’ contemporary (and liberal) promotion. This study uses a historical and institutionalist approach to understand the context, actors, and underlying factors that allowed for this historical continuity, resulting in the permanence of these instruments.