Broken promises and transoceanic fragments: Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria, 1935–46

This article examines the personal experiences and memories of Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria in the years leading up to and immediately after the Second World War, revealing the tensions between migration and movement, on the one hand, and memory and loss, on the other. By engaging with the ideas surrounding tairiku (‘continents’) in early to mid-twentieth century Japan, this article moves away from triangulating the transoceanic movements of Japanese tango musicians and musical commodities across Japan, China and Latin America at this time. Instead, it considers such movements as the sonic manifestation of the island/continent dichotomy that framed Japanese maritime thinking in the first half of the twentieth century. Consequently, in offering a Japan-reflexive scholarship for the study and writing of global music histories, this article argues for the need to move beyond a geo-oceanic approach in examining transoceanic circulations

The First Anglo-Burmese War

In March 1824 the East India Company declared war on Burma, the opening salvo in a series of conflicts that would see one empire fall, another expand and leave divisive wounds still felt today

Print, Publish, Punish: The Qur’an and the Law from Colonial India to Contemporary Pakistan

This paper contributes a legal and a South Asian perspective to the emerging scholarship on the materiality of the Qur’an, exploring and analysing the development of the laws and regulations that protect the Qur’an as a sacred object against the risk desecration, defilement as well as heretical translations and interpretations. Starting with the enactment of Indian Penal Code, 1860 in colonial India and ending with amendments to the Punjab Holy Quran (Printing and Recording) Act, 2011 in 2022, this paper identifies multiple layers of statutes and regulations that accompany the life-cycle of the Qur’an from ‘cradle to grave’. In analysing the legal developments that have fused the object and the text of the Qurʾan into a legal entity that demands particular interpretations of Islam, this paper identifies an Islamic state doctrine that asks and expects the Pakistani state to protect and promote Islamic law and religion in an increasing number of contexts and occasions, the protection of the Qurʾan being only one of them

Defaulting on Development and Climate: Debt Sustainability and the Race for the 2030 Agenda and Paris Agreement

In this report we perform an enhanced global external debt sustainability analysis to estimate the extent to which EMDEs can mobilize the G20 independent Expert Group recommended levels of external financing without jeopardizing debt sustainability. We find that among 66 of the most economically vulnerable countries, 47 countries with a total population of over 1.11 billion people will face insolvency problems in the next five years as they seek to ramp up investment to meet climate and development goals. Debt relief must be administered for these countries to stand a chance to invest in a climate-resilient future and achieve their development aspirations

CAViaR models for Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall with long range dependency features

We consider alternative specifications of conditional autoregressive quantile models to estimate Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall. The proposed specifications include a slow moving component in the quantile process, along with aggregate returns from heterogeneous horizons as regressors. Using data for 10 stock indices, we evaluate the performance of the models and find that the proposed features are useful in capturing tail dynamics better

Premodifiers and a scarcity-productivity hypothesis in Yorùbá: Does the scarcity of adjectives influence productivity of the premodification slot?

The notion that the Yorùbá language operates only a small, closed class of adjectives is well noted in the literature. However, this hypothesis of scarcity of adjectives in the Yorùbá language is yet to be examined in light of how such scarcity may influence the creativity of speakers in creating new functional adjectives, influence the placement of ‘created’ adjectives and the productivity of the premodification slot in the noun phrase structure. Combining theoretical concepts from construction grammar with corpus evidence drawn from a major source of contemporary Yorùbá, the article shows how speakers of Yorùbá negotiate between scarcity, creativity, placement and complexity in modifying their referents. The article identifies different forms of premodifiers, especially a sort of ‘creative premodifier’ with which a complex syntactic-semantic behaviour is built into the ensuing NP structure. It is argued that a scarcity of attributive adjectives in the language is a crucial variable with which relations between premodifiers and postmodifiers can be explored

From online to offline: Getting ready for in-person fieldwork through social media ethnography

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant emphasis on finding solutions to continue academic research in light of closed borders. The inability to travel has prompted academic researchers to reconsider their approaches to fieldwork, with a particular focus on utilizing modern technology effectively to conduct accurate ethnographic research even while working remotely. This has entailed navigating the vast expanse of the internet carefully and acquiring additional tools in the field of ethnography. The primary concerns surrounding conducting remote fieldwork and ensuring the proper selection of data can be summarized by exploring strategies to overcome the challenges imposed by restrictions, as well as leveraging modern technology to study distant cultures without compromising comprehension. Taking into consideration my research on the Japanese experimental noise music scene and the necessity to collect information about the response and activities of these artists at the brink of the pandemic, I challenged my need to collect data by practising through the internet and modern technologies new ways to undertake ethnographic research through distance. In this sense, social networks demonstrated how modern ethnographic methods can be effectively applied to conduct functional social media ethnography, mitigating the challenges brought about by physical distance constraints. Specifically for my research, Reddit’s feature of organizing communities into subtopics named “subreddits” provides me with the possibility to keep in touch with reliable users and information by selecting specific subreddits related to Japan and music topics (e.g. “r/japaneseunderground”, “r/noisemusic”). Along with the existing literature and the constant online research for news related to my project, social media ethnography played a functional role not only in collecting relevant data but also in providing me with more clarity about how to further move my fieldwork once I can travel to Japan. By emphasizing the potential of social media as a valuable avenue to enhance research strategies in times of crisis, this paper aims to consider how online fieldwork created to overcome the impossibility of fieldwork travel can result in a profitable social media ethnography not only to collect data by distance but also to gain appropriate preparation for following in-person fieldwork by relying on our primary findings. By retracing step by step my research project on Japanese noise music, I will explain how undertaking online research provided me with further ideas to achieve more findings and add clarities to my research intent once I had to switch to offline fieldwork

Sustainable future bonds: Boosting multilateral development banks lending and improving the global reserve system

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) are crucial players to finance a greener, more socially inclusive and sustainable future, given their unique financial model that provides low‐cost and long‐term investments in areas aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate commitments. To fulfill their potential, MDBs need a stepwise increase in financing, which has been a challenge given the reluctance of their shareholders to provide additional paid‐in capital. We present a novel proposal for MDB hybrid capital that is designed to boost MDB funding while supplying the international reserve system with a new safe asset, the Sustainable Future Bonds (SFB). Under the SFB proposal, a tiny fraction of the global foreign reserves would be rechanneled to MDBs, and given liquidity enhanced mechanisms, SFB would serve as an additional safe reserve asset for central banks' portfolios. As our conservative estimation shows, by deploying just 0.5 percent of global foreign reserves for the Sustainable Future Bonds, at least $45 billion per year in fresh capital to MDBs would be mobilized. At that pace, by 2030, MDBs will have$360 billion in capital injections, which, depending on their leverage capacity, could result in new lending from $1.6 trillion to$1.9 trillion

Rethinking the migration state: historicising, decolonising, and disaggregating

This essay (re-) introduces the concept of the migration state and its significance for migration studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, discussing its intellectual history and relationship to Hollifield’s wider body of work. The authors lay out the main features of the ideal-typical liberal democratic migration state before discussing the extent to which it can be used to describe and theorise a wider variety of migration states, paying attention to the particularities of state development across different cases and regions, but also looking forward to how imperial and colonial legacies may shape future state responses to managing migration and mobility. Drawing on the individual contributions to this special issue, we suggest three theoretical and conceptual moves that can enrich our understanding of contemporary migration states: historicisation, decolonisation, and disaggregation. We discuss how the articles in this special issue engage with the migration state concept in ways that incorporate developments in migration studies over the past twenty years, using the concept to push the field in new temporal and comparative directions that open up the possibility of a more global approach to understanding migration. The essay concludes by looking at the future of the migration state and suggests areas for further research