Welfare policies and direct benefit transfers have been at the heart of India’s political marketplace for several decades but the longer-term history of welfare in India is surprisingly little known. Louise Tillin’s new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) recovers a history that is crucial for understanding the current juncture of welfare politics and political economy in India.

Despite limited empirical evidence of its effectiveness, transitional justice remains the dominant paradigm within international peacebuilding frameworks for addressing conflict-related harm. The field, which expanded significantly after the Nuremberg trials and tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, has faced sustained critique for its legalism, international imposition, and marginalisation of victims—prompting calls for structural transformation.

What sort of space is the gallery under contemporary conditions of political authoritarianism and “too late” capitalism?

The development process in India, along with its alleged achievements, has induced multiple difficulties and hardships for poor and working people. In villages, farming families confront an agrarian crisis, with rising costs of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, inadequate irrigation facilities, low prices for their crops, grave indebtedness, and ecological damage to the soil, water, and forests. Due to a paucity of jobs in the countryside, many are compelled to migrate to cities for work.

Though little studied, letter sutras help us recover the stories of love, loss, and mourners turning to the things left behind in the wake of death to make something meaningful. This talk explores Japanese medieval makers who reused and recycled the epistles of their dead for the copying of sacred Buddhist text to create potent palimpsests known as letter sutras – objects that have lurked beneath the surface of Japanese material culture and punctuated the personal histories of famous figures since the ninth century.

A growing literature finds high returns to firms with legislative connections. Less attention has been paid to returns from bureaucratic connections and to organizations beyond for-profit firms. Using data recording the first post-bureaucracy position occupied by all former civil servants in Japan, Dr. Incerti reveals a bifurcated job market for former bureaucrats. High-ranking officials from elite economic ministries are more likely to join for-profit firms, where they generate returns such as increased government loans and positive stock market reactions.

Professor Jones will summarize a recent paper in which he offers a new heuristic for understanding how and why constitutional claims are litigated in Japan. He offers a number of common features to the small and seemingly unrelated instances in which the Supreme Court of Japan has found a statute unconstitutional. He uses this heuristic to understand certain constitutional challenges currently in the news, including those relating to marriage equality and spousal surnames. 

This presentation is based on a collaborative research project with Tadashi Iwami (Hokkaido University) and Marc Barcelos (Aarhus University), exploring how Japan’s longest-serving prime minister Abe Shinzō strategically used emotional rhetoric to garner international support for his Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) vision. The study introduces an innovative methodology using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a machine learning model capable of detecting and analysing syntax-sensitive emotional expressions in texts.

We’re a day too late for Mr. Fawkes, but plenty of sparks still flying tonight. Join us, on the one-year anniversary of Suzuki Izumi’s most recent anglophone rebirth, as we delve into the process of translating emotions and psyches through words and movement. Alice Baldock and Helen O’Horan will be in conversation about the avant-garde in 1970s–1980s Japan, bodies and gender across languages, working with modern classics, Japanese sci-fi, and speculative “fiction.” And trashy dating shows!