This article reinterprets Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea (1592–1598) as a project of revisionist order-building undertaken by a liminal polity situated between two competing systems: the declining Ming-centered Chinese international system and the advancing Spanish–Portuguese imperial order. Rather than viewing the invasions as products of domestic consolidation, megalomania, or simple expansionism, the study situates them within Japan’s systemic dilemma of in-betweenness. From this perspective, Hideyoshi’s campaigns represented an attempt to construct a Japan-centered international system designed to assert autonomy, deter Iberian colonization, and reconfigure regional hierarchy. Drawing on the concept of liminality in international relations (IR), the paper shows how actors at the margins of overlapping systems can exercise strategic agency – not only adapting to dominant orders but seeking to create alternative ones. Hideyoshi’s vision combined elements of the Chinese international system and deterrent signaling aimed at European powers, producing a hybrid order neither Confucian nor colonial. Although the project collapsed after his death, it temporarily deterred European expansion and reshaped East Asian political dynamics. Theoretically, this case extends debates on revisionism and liminality, demonstrating that order-building from the margins can be both creative and destructive, illuminating broader dynamics of plural international orders.

With the eastward expansion of the Western Zhou c. 1050 BC, the Jiaodong Peninsula on the north-east coast of modern-day China became part of a large polity. Excavations at Qianzhongzitou, located on this peninsula, are revealing how political control over local populations took place. Here, the authors focus on a sequence of Zhou-period, non-residential platforms, the construction of which signifies new forms of ritual spaces. These types of spaces, also found elsewhere in the region, arguably aided in the state assimilation of local deities, illustrating the critical role that ritual played in political unification of early Chinese states and dynasties.

Anthracological studies of preserved wooden building materials can help reveal ancient networks of resource mobilisation. Here, the authors report on the analysis of 657 charred timbers from four ancillary pits at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor. The frequent use of dark coniferous wood (fir, spruce and hemlock) indicates sophisticated logistical planning and labour organisation—matching historic records of Qin administrative ascendency—because these species required sourcing from across many kilometres of rugged terrain. Identification of a temporal shift towards the use of higher-elevation species points to the ecological impact of large-scale timber harvesting.

The pandemic of Covid-19 exposed critical gaps in social policy and underscored the foundational role of families and households in both societal and economic stability. This introductory chapter to a Special Issue explores the interdependence between formal economic participation and unpaid domestic labour – collectively referred to as ‘social reproduction’. Drawing on feminist political economy, the chapter addresses how gendered and undervalued reproductive labour is essential to economic growth and the realisation of international commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly gender equality and inclusive growth. This Special Issue uses South Korea as a comparative case study due to its unique economic trajectory, rapid demographic ageing, stark gender inequalities, and limited social protection systems. The country’s long working hours, low fertility rate, and pronounced wage and care burdens on women illustrate how inadequate social reproduction support can threaten broader social and economic sustainability. The pandemic further intensified these issues, disrupting institutional supports and deepening inequalities. This Special Issue collectively examines how policies across different contexts either alleviate or exacerbate the tensions between productive and reproductive labour, using South Korea as a focal point for comparison. This comparative analysis highlights the need for structural reforms and cultural change to support effective social reproduction policies, emphasising that gender-equal leave, accessible childcare, and shared caregiving responsibilities are crucial for work-family balance and social well-being. South Korea’s experience illustrates both progress and ongoing challenges, offering valuable lessons on the limitations of market-driven approaches and the importance of resilient, state-supported family policies.

Since the mid-2010s, conflicts at UNESCO over the interpretation of Japanese colonial rule and wartime actions in the first half of the twentieth century in Japan, South Korea, and China have been fierce. Contested nominations include the Meiji Industrial Revolution Sites for the World Heritage List (Japan), the Documents of Nanjing Massacre for the Memory of the World (MoW) Register (China), and two still pending applications on the Documents on the Comfort Women (South Korean and Japanese NGOs). This paper examines the recent “heritage war” negotiations at UNESCO as they unfolded in a changing political, economic, and security environment. Linking World Heritage and MoW nominations together for a holistic analysis, this paper clarifies the interests of State actors and of various non-State actors, such as NGOs, experts, and the UNESCO secretariat. We discuss the prospects for these contested nominations and recommend further involvement of non-State actors to ensure more constructive and inclusive heritage interpretation to enable a more comprehensive understanding of history.

This paper draws together the connections between the concepts of critical human security and state capacity and explores their relevance as a novel analytical framework for exploring the global pandemic and its aftermath, with a particular focus on Europe and East Asia. The paper highlights the relevance of integrating a ‘state capacity for human security’ analytical lens and policy philosophy to inform an understanding of human (in)security as well as its relevance for concerns around social protection, sustainability, and inequality. We argue that the long-held and taken-for-granted assumption that larger, high-spending welfare states produce greater well-being security can no longer be an automatic supposition given the nature and sources of risk and insecurity in the contemporary world. We argue that that widening the parameters and focus of social policy analysis towards state capacity for critical human security might better highlight the multi-dimensional challenges that welfare states should seek to address.

How can states credibly commit to peace and assure other countries? One source of credible assurance identified in previous studies is the cost to a state’s international reputation. When a state violates a prior commitment to peace, it suffers reputational damage, which can be costly in various ways. These reputational costs, in turn, serve as a tying-hands signal that enhances the credibility of peaceful commitments. Nonetheless, empirical research on whether and under what conditions such reputation costs arise remains limited. To address this gap, this study conducts a preregistered survey experiment in the United States, using a hypothetical scenario involving military buildups by China and Japan. The results indicate that violating commitments to peace undermines the credibility of future commitments, particularly when the violator is a rival country. These findings suggest that, with some limitations, international reputation costs can serve as a reliable mechanism for ensuring the credibility of assurances.

The Medieval Wall System (MWS), constructed in the tenth–thirteenth centuries AD across parts of Mongolia, China and Russia, was one of several long walls built along ancient frontiers in Asia. Despite a growing body of literature about this network of walls and trenches, many questions still surround its construction and function. Here, the authors present results of archaeological investigations on the Mongolian Arc of the MWS, revealing new construction dates and insights into daily life. Rather than a regimented defence, the MWS, at least in parts, was a symbolic boundary that endured within the social landscape long after it was abandoned.

Throughout the twentieth century, Taiwan and South Korea underwent rapid economic development and successfully democratized without reversal to authoritarianism. Despite their similar trajectories, the two countries diverge significantly in political and public support for gender equality. Taiwan is widely seen as the most gender-equal country in Asia, while South Korea remains deeply polarized, with uneven progress in women’s representation. What accounts for this divergence between two democracies? This article advances a political institutions thesis, arguing that differences in democratic institution-building—particularly the actors and modes of democratization—have shaped the contour of gender politics of each country. Contrasting the histories of party-driven democratization in Taiwan and mass-driven democratization in South Korea, this article shows that the process of building democracy has had lasting effects on the institutionalization and sustainability of gender equality.

This study explores the first East Asian encounters with Western museums by travelers in the nineteenth century. In contrast with our contemporary familiarity with this institution, these travelers had to translate their new discovery into their own meaningful categories. In translating the word “museum,” East Asian travelers composed several words using Chinese character compounds that reveal much about their understanding of the concept in terms of their own culture and language. Moreover, the underlying conceptual categories they invoked shaped their perception of the displays they saw in the various museums they encountered. We see their struggle to settle on a shared term for “museum” so that Kume Kunitake (1839-1931), for example, differentiated the British Museum, the Mauritshuis Museum, and the Swedish Nationalmuseum by employing different common nouns. However, their insights, bewilderment, and even their “misunderstandings” offer us an opportunity to reconsider the modern museum from an external perspective.

The articles re-examines the March First Movement of 1919 in light of the “Candlelight Revolution” of 2016-2017 and situates the latter as part of the incremental unfolding of a long revolution that started with the former. To do so, it turns attention to the East Asian configuration in which three nations—Imperial Japan, semi-colonial China, and colonized Korea—were all connected to the world order and interacted with one another while occupying their respective positions in the world hierarchy. The March First can be regarded as a beginning of a national revolution that sought a kaebyŏk ((開闢, a great opening of a new heaven and earth), not only to adapt to modernity but also to overcome it, and the subsequent history is characterized by “incremental unfolding” of the revolution -through April Nineteenth (1960), May Eighteenth (1980), and lately, the Candlelight revolution (2016). These revolutionary transformations have been forwarded by the Korean people who remain inspired by the light of the March First. Their longing for a kaebyŏk that involves more than a mere reform of political institutions/systems connects the years of 1919 and 2019.

The four major countries of East Asia—China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—form one of the most densely populated regions on earth, and through the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries the region experienced some of its fastest economic growth, propelled by the policies of state-led developmentalism. As a result of this density and these policies, the four countries in turn became some of the most environmentally degraded. As each achieved middle-to-high income status, however, the populace and then the regime in each country realized that they could not sustain either rapid economic growth or popular legitimacy without addressing the environmental consequences of this fast growth. The four states thus changed their fundamental economic policies from pure developmentalism to what we call eco-developmentalism, an attempt to reconcile economic prosperity with environmental sustainability. Although success so far has been mixed, this turn to eco-developmentalism has allowed these states to claim world leadership in mitigating environmental degradation.

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.

Facing dwindling birthrates, East Asia has shown unprecedented fertility-oriented family policy expansion. Despite this shared objective, this research argues that East Asian family policy has varied in ‘inclusiveness’, namely, the extent to which it equally promotes all births, irrespective of familial socioeconomic status in particular. Firstly, from an inclusiveness-centred perspective, this article builds three different ideal pronatalist family policy approaches: the ‘inclusive’, where pronatalist family support is provided for almost everyone; the ‘selective’, where it is more accessible to middle-/upper-income households; and the ‘residual’, where it is concentrated on low-income classes. Guided by this conceptual framework, it compares Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. It reveals that Japan and Singapore promoted a selective path, and Taiwan favoured a residual one, whilst South Korea pioneered more inclusive support. However, it also suggests that the other three societies recently adopted more inclusive pronatalist family policies, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.