How can we explain interactions between historical international orders? Despite growing interest in the role of marginal interactions in the evolution of international orders, scholars struggle to account for their contingency. Enduring commitments to substantialist approaches limit our ability to theorize the link between micro-level interactions in system encounters and macro-level international order, and vice versa. I argue that conflicts in system encounters can be explained as manifestations of a process through which international orders and their differences are constituted and negotiated. International orders and their differences exist in concrete instantiations only in the context of system encounters. Building on a practice-relational approach to international order, I propose that system encounters are characterized by a series of crises that challenge the taken-for-granted nature of established practices, prompting actors to articulate the relevant differences between them. I illustrate this process in the context of the Russian, Dutch, and British embassies to China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and show how the relevant differences between the East Asian and European international orders can be reconstructed from those interactions. This paper advances the study of historical international orders and has important implications for how we think about conflicts in system encounters.

What drives campaign finance reform in emerging democracies: politicians protecting their own interests, or organized civic pressure from below? This paper argues that South Korea’s landmark 2004 campaign finance reforms resulted from civic accountability, not cartel party logic. Case study analysis of four reform episodes from 1991 to 2004 shows that civic groups consistently drove reform, while ruling and opposition party politicians alike resisted to protect clientelist networks. Civic groups prevailed by building organizational capacity and strategic sophistication, most critically deploying blacklists in 2000 and 2004 to defeat corrupt incumbents and secure institutionalized seats in the reform process. Survey evidence confirms the reforms genuinely reduced illicit spending. Regression analysis reveals that reform-backing legislators shared the same emancipatory modernization values that civic groups mobilized in their blacklisting campaigns, while cartel party proxies yielded null or negative coefficients across all specifications. Longitudinal analysis reinforces this: the most dramatic gains in legislator emancipatory values coincided with blacklist campaigns that displaced the legislature’s most clientelist members. That civic accountability dismantled entrenched electoral clientelism in a case as challenging as Korea, with its chaebol-dominated economy, Confucian deference, and conservative democratic transition, offers genuine hope to other emerging democracies facing corruption and elite resistance.

The family Allocreadiidae comprises diverse parasites of freshwater fishes, but their evolutionary timescale remains poorly understood. We provide a molecular dating analysis based on an expanded 28S rRNA dataset and redescriptions of two East Asian species, Allocreadium hasu and A. pseudaspii, with new morphological and genetic data. Allocreadium hasu from Lake Biwa (Japan) is genetically close to Far Eastern A. khankaiense and A. anastasii (0.09–0.97% divergence in 28S) but has not been recorded in the Russian Far East. Allocreadium pseudaspii, first recorded in the Bolshaya Ussurka River, possesses eyespot remnants and occupies a unique position among European species, suggesting secondary eastward dispersal. Phylogenetic analyses confirm family monophyly and resolve relationships among Palaearctic genera. Divergence time estimates indicate the most recent common ancestor of Allocreadiidae originated in East Asia during the Lower Cretaceous (~110 Ma). Diversification of major genera coincides with radiation of primary fish hosts: Allocreadium with Cypriniformes (~93 Ma), Bunodera with Perciformes (~75 Ma), and Crepidostomum s. str. with Nemacheilidae (~49 Ma). The basal genus Acrolichanus, parasitic on sturgeons, diverged earlier (40–80 Ma). The split between the Neotropical genus Margotrema and its Palaearctic relatives is estimated at ~6.5 Ma, consistent with closure of the Panama Isthmus. Our results provide a temporal framework for Allocreadiidae evolution, linking diversification to biogeographic history of freshwater fish hosts in East Asia and subsequent dispersal to North America via the Bering land bridge and to South America through the Panama Isthmus.

The Miaodongyingdongnan lithic assemblage, dated to c. 70–100 ka, features a core-and-flake technocomplex that incorporates both simple and planned technologies. Distinct from the Early and Middle Pleistocene assemblages in the Lower Yangzi region, it signals a technological shift toward small-flake debitage and retouch systems during the Late Pleistocene.

This article examines the challenges of border-crossing science at geopolitical hot spots through the case study of the East Sea (also known as the Sea of Japan). The East Sea is a marginal sea on the north-west Pacific Ocean surrounded by four historically conflicted nations—South Korea, North Korea, Russia, and Japan. Despite vast scientific interest, severe military conflicts have restricted transnational cooperation in this region throughout the late twentieth century. Utilizing personal archives, cruise reports, and interviews with participating scientists, this article examines how an international team of East Asian oceanographers developed material, political, and rhetorical tactics to circumvent and even appropriate complex border problems at the end of the Cold War. The case study suggests that the global history of oceanography should pay further attention to the practical challenges of accessing geopolitically conflicted basins as well as creative strategies that scientists devise to bridge over those troubled waters.

Our Forum envisions East Asia as part of Islamic Asia, treating it as a space where Muslim communities have forged cross-border networks across time, episodically, and where discourses about Islam have circulated and been appropriated in interconnection with Muslim-majority regions of the continent (that is, ‘Islamic’ Asia). We hold that Islam, as a constellation of religious, political, cultural, and social formations, questions the spatial and conceptual boundaries of East Asia, while East Asia expands the known geographies of Islamic Asia. The articles in this Forum show that Islam was a shared paradigm of meaning-making across inter-Asian geographies, and offered alternative modes and axes of spatial production and political idioms that both Muslims and non-Muslims latched onto across Asia, including its easternmost reaches.

This study explores the concept of ‘destituent power’ and ‘recall procedures’, highlighting the relevance of philosophical thought for global constitutionalism and democratic oversight. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s notions of ‘vigilance’ and the ‘political paradox’ (1957), I argue that destituent power offers an important mechanism for maintaining accountability within constitutional systems. The paper brings political philosophy into dialogue with an empirical constitutional study of three East Asian countries – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. These non-Western experiences clarify the practical dynamics of destituent power and bring to light innovative, yet little-known, recall mechanisms that carry significance for global constitutionalism.

This essay explores what it means to reckon with imperial violence decades after the Japanese Empire’s demise in 1945. Through legal, historical, and ethnographic analyses of civil lawsuits filed in courts across Japan since the 1990s by Chinese and South Korean victims seeking apologies and monetary compensation from the Japanese government and corporations involved in enslavement, I explore how the lawsuits exposed a politics of abandonment that left victims of imperial violence unredressable for decades. This evasion of imperial accountability, I argue, was etched into the legal, economic, and diplomatic structures of what I call the unmaking of empire—the entwined processes of de-imperialization and de-colonization. The move from empire to nation-state thus produced transitional injustice which calls for post-imperial reckoning: a double task of accounting for both the original imperial violence and the politics of abandonment after empire in perpetrator and victim nations. I show how new legal and moral landscapes for imperial reckoning are expanding the scope and agency of accountability, challenging accepted models of redress and raising the stakes for current generations to reckon with unaccounted-for pasts.

This article challenges the traditional view of the linear causality of technological globalization in the history of modern predictive meteorology. According to this linear narrative, telegraphy, by enabling near-instantaneous communication over vast distances, was the causa efficiens that directly and inevitably produced large-scale weather forecasting. However, the role of Jesuit scientists in East Asia as pioneers of cyclone warning systems not only demonstrates that the linear narrative is too simple but invites a rigorous examination of the relationships between prior knowledge networks and technological infrastructures. This article contends that the expansion of technological networks does not inexorably imply the expansion of knowledge networks. There was not, therefore, a unidirectional causal relationship but a concomitant two-way interaction; that is, there was a coextension of knowledge and technological networks, where both Jesuit scientists and telegraph companies benefited from each other and shared common goals confronting a global threat—cyclones. This offers a new perspective not only on the history of meteorological services but also of science globalization.

This cross-national comparative study examines how social role and social capital are associated with gender differences in volunteering in four regions of East Asia–China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Using the 2012 East Asia Social Survey, we find that women in East Asia, particularly in South Korea, are less likely to volunteer than men. Additionally, women with children are less likely to volunteer than men with children, especially when their secular and religious group participations are not considered, which is consistent with the social role theory. Social capital indicators, including trust, neighborhood support, informal network, secular group participation, and religious group participation, significantly increase the likelihood of volunteering. More importantly, the results indicate that secular group participation moderates gender differences in volunteering. Women who participate in secular groups are more likely to volunteer than men in East Asia. The theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed.

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.