Indonesia, like many other countries, has encountered a slew of social, political, economic, and public health challenges in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to these challenges, the Indonesian government implemented security measures by instituting large-scale social restrictions (Indonesian: Pembatasan Sosial Berskala Besar) and, later, micro-scale social restrictions (Pemberlakukan Pembatasan Kegiatan Masyarakat) to restrict people's mobility and virus transmission. Using securitisation theory as a framework, this article examines how the nationwide dilemma between public health and economic security arose. Based on official documents, government papers, and political speeches, this study reveals how the country's COVID-19 responses were largely defined by carefully constructed and flexible measures known as the ‘gas and brake’ policy (Kebijakan Gas dan Rem), which were aimed at resolving the health-economic dilemma. This policy is deemed appropriate given the country's limited public health and economic resources, despite the fact that many argue that such an approach reflects indecisiveness and a lack of coordination among the country's authorities. This article also demonstrates that policymakers in Indonesia use this policy to resolve the securitisation dilemma by reinforcing the hierarchical ordering of security sectors as a readjustment strategy. The policy is used to justify tightening or easing social restrictions by changing the security narrative throughout the pandemic.

The aim of this article is to show that in Achaemenid Elamite the sign <MAN> had a secondary phonetic value /me/. The evidence collected in support of this claim consists mainly in Elamite transcriptions of Iranian words in the Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions and in the Persepolis administrative texts, which are impossible or very difficult to account for only contemplating the usual value /man/.

Drawing upon rhetorical approaches to citizenship, this article analyzes how the contested notion of Bosnian-Herzegovinian (BiH) citizenship has been crafted on the discursive level during two series of social mobilizations taking place in 2013 and 2014. It aims to provide a better understanding of how various actors make sense of BiH citizenship. This study investigates what values were associated with citizenship, how boundaries of membership were drawn, and how the ethno-national dimension and linguistic complexities came into play. It analyzes a corpus of 150 media articles covering the protests in four major printed daily newspapers while methodologically relying on the discourse historical approach developed by Reisigl and Wodak. The analysis demonstrates that discursive articulations of citizenship are generated within the immediate context of social mobilization but are also influenced by historical legacies, institutional preconditions, regional aspects or global narratives. It shows that the decentralized institutional set up combined with the multi-layered and multidimensional meaning of citizenship blur the notion of BiH citizenship as an all-encompassing term and pose an obstacle to the formulation of an alternative vision of the BiH polity to the post-Dayton order.

By investigating a one thousandth national execution quota issued in the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950–1953), the article explores an aspect of Maoist politics that has largely escaped mainstream scholarship on Mao, the CCP, and PRC history. It shows how the newly created Maoist regime sought to eliminate its political enemy based on a specific demographic estimate of one thousandth. Tracing the roots of this quantification of political enemies into Mao's class-analysis theory back to the 1920s and explaining other political campaigns throughout the 1950s as continuations of the party's use of this method, the article argues that quantitative concepts and relations were important instruments in Maoist ideology, the CCP's political strategy and the working of the party-state. By proposing a concept of “quotacide,” the article identifies an ignored type of large-scale, ideologically based, and politically driven homicide in the history of political violence. The article also brings in similar quantitative policies of political suppression in other authoritarian party-states such as the Soviet Union (the 1930s) and North Vietnam (the 1950s) in this context.

This study employs the “everyday nationhood” approach to explore how ordinary, ethnically diverse, native-born Germans in Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig understand what it means to be German and whether outsiders can join that group. It puts findings from qualitative interviews conducted in Berlin in fall 2015 and in Dresden and Leipzig in April 2016 into conversation with two large-scale surveys conducted at about the same time. The interviews complicate the surveys’ finding that Germanness is now based primarily on language skills, citizenship, and workforce participation, as the respondents indicated that phenotype, ethnicity, and religion act as daily barriers to membership. This highlights the utility of the everyday nationhood approach for identifying how social categories are both understood and enacted through everyday practices of social inclusion and exclusion.

Magellan's Malay slave, Enrique, accompanied him on his voyages and may have actually been the first to circumnavigate the world. This paper examines the extent to which the still sporadic and small-scale — but sometimes fierce — online disputes between Indonesian and Malaysian netizens over the “ownership” and “national” origin of Enrique might develop further as part of the long-standing “heritage war” between the two countries. It explains the historical roots of the dispute over Enrique, discusses reactions to it in Indonesia and, to an extent, in Malaysia, and analyses the coverage of and exchanges about Enrique on social media. Set against the backdrop of Lebow's constructivist cultural theory, this paper posits that the mutually reactive national identification process between Indonesians and Malaysians might significantly influence the trajectory of this conflict. If efforts in Indonesia to promote the idea of Enrique Maluku succeed and it becomes truly widely known, what are currently small and irregular skirmishes online over Enrique could develop into another enduring segment of the heritage war between the two countries.

In the 1970s, communities of the Kalinga sub-ethnic group in the Cordillera Mountains in northern Philippines successfully halted the construction of a series of hydroelectric dams along their main waterway, the Chico River, which would have caused their displacement. Based on interviews and archival research, the article examines the role played by a Kalinga political institution known as the bodong or peace pact in the Kalingas’ mobilisation against the dam project, using an analytical framework drawn from Charles Tilly's and Sidney Tarrow's work on contentious politics.

One of the most visible and enduring vestiges of colonialism is its buildings. In this article I address the question of how current approving references to the colonial buildings in Indonesia should be explained, looking at one particular city, Surabaya. The cheerful, innovative adoption of colonial themes defies an analysis in terms of ‘imperial debris’. I propose to borrow the term ‘bricolage’ from Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe this process in which people make new associations between selected colonial buildings and their own present lives. Bricolage is the selective conceptual appropriation of the colonial buildings for whatever objective the user finds convenient: objects to boost city marketing, a company advertisement, stops on a heritage tour, amusing backdrops for pictures and selfies, a counterpoint to a consumerist lifestyle in shopping malls. For colonial building enthusiasts, the love of colonial design and old urban quarters is more than a matter of the aesthetics of urban spaces, but also, indirectly, a critique of the transformation of modern cities by short-sighted real-estate developers and city administrators, who demolish irreplaceable buildings in acts of ‘architectural suicide’.

The Manchurian Candidate myth that Americans could be psychologically manipulated and turned into secret agents of a foreign power emerged in the early Cold War. The belief combined fears that Soviet/Chinese mind manipulators were so adept that they could transform honorable American soldiers into turncoats. However, while disquiet about the efficacy of communist brainwashing remained palpable in the aftermath of World War II, the result of China's communist treatment of prisoners of war did not create, as was greatly feared, actual Manchurian candidates capable of misleading their native publics once repatriated. If brainwashing in the American understanding of the term did not occur, what was the actual outcome and what sort of processes were used on Asians who were not part of the communist masses? We need to unravel the PRC's take on the processes of “thought reform” to understand why it kept returning to a policy designed to “re-educate” prisoners of war, often doubly labeled as war criminals. These policies not only reveal how the CCP aimed to render justice beyond the conclusion of its war with Japan but also demonstrate how this practice then grew into a later catalyst for unification plans in PRC-ROC relations during the 1970s.

The Iron-Age Eurasian nomads created and circulated elaborate metalworks embellished with images of entwined, abbreviated, or contorted zoomorphic anatomies. This approach to zoomorphism has entered scholarly discourse under the blanket name “animal style,” a term often used to describe a vast corpus of zoomorphic images associated with the arts of steppe pastoralists. Numerous Warring States burials across the Ordos Loop indicate the transmission and adaptation of steppe-inspired zoomorphism into the funerary cultures of China's northern zone (beifang diqu 北方地區) and the Eastern Steppe more broadly. In the Han dynasty, animal-style images seem to have been transmitted even more widely, reaching China's southern periphery at the Kingdom of Nanyue 南越 and Lelang 樂浪 in the northern Korean peninsula. The Xianbei hegemony in the post-Han period marked a new trajectory for these designs, which reached Kofun Japan in the fifth century. Thus, the original trans-steppe visual formula underwent significant regional and local translations on a material and conceptual level to fit already established Chinese design strategies, techniques, and conceptions of animality. In this essay, I explore the regional alterations applied to the “supra” animal-style visuality in the Chinese northern periphery and other regions of Chinese political influence in North and Central Asia. In so doing, I seek to understand the swift entry of nomadic visual tropes, namely a specific “pars-pro-toto” device, into the visual vocabulary of early Chinese craftsmen from the Eastern Zhou to the Northern dynasties.

Yue gong qi shi 越公其事 is a recently published manuscript from the Tsinghua University collection. The manuscript provides a new version of the well-known story of King Goujian of Yue 越王句踐 (r. 496–464 b.c.e.), who turned defeat into victory and overcame Yue's formidable rival, the state of Wu 吳. My exploration of this text focuses on its two most notable aspects. First, the story about the policy of self-strengthening allegedly adopted by Goujian offers new insights into the evolution of political thought in the Warring States period. Second, the text allows deeper insight into the genre of didactic historical narratives that became prominent at a certain point of time between the Springs-and-Autumns (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 b.c.e.) and the Warring States (Zhanguo 戰國, 453–221 b.c.e.) periods.

Tracing the assumption behind China's nationality identification that the Dan constituted a littoral minzu, this article examines the rise and circulation of “Dan” as a racial entity in writings by Chinese thinkers, reformers, and scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. It explains how “Dan” emerged as a zu, minzu, zhongzu, and renzhong in late-Qing political polemics and pedagogical texts, and how this notion was combined with Republican-era scholarship on the Dan within and across the disciplines of popular literature, folklore, ethnohistory, and anthropology. Both Western and imperial Chinese scholarly trends and racialist ideas shaped pre-1949 Dan studies. Modern intellectuals presented the Dan as a non-Han minority based on various nationalist concerns as well as their Han and regional identities. From a historical perspective, this article redraws the geoethnic landscape of modern China by taking transregional littoral fringes into consideration and calling for attention to those identified as non-Han before the nationality investigation in the 1950s but as Han afterward.