This article considers the experiences of Dutch and Indonesian women in enforced prostitution for the Japanese military during World War Two and the activism of prominent survivors and their supporters from the 1990s. It highlights how and why Japanese activists have continued to support these women and why Dutch and Indonesian women have rarely engaged in joint activism. It analyses how Dutch and Indonesian women's stories are presented together in a 2015-2016 exhibition at the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo and how women's and soldiers' testimonies are used to advocate further redress from the Japanese government and to challenge military sexual violence against women. The article assesses how a sustained focus in transnational activism on Japanese responsibility and the Japanese imperial context potentially leads to overlooking how localised forms of patriarchy and the specific context of this former Dutch colony affected women's experiences and their post war treatment.

In this transcription of a webinar from October 2023, speakers Kevin Blackburn (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Katharine McGregor (University of Melbourne, Australia), and Sachiyo Tsukamoto (University of Newcastle, Australia) talk about their new books on the “comfort women.”

This paper examines a protest tour in Okinawa in which participants travelled from different prefectures in Japan to protest against construction of a new military base at Henoko. Drawing on participant observation, surveys, and interviews with group members and a peace-tour guide, it examines how participants experienced Okinawa as a destination of political activismm, and assesses their experience. The tour contributed to developing a sense of solidarity among the participants in support of demilitarization in Okinawa. Protest tourism provided a space for education about militarism on the ground. However, drawing from the fields of critical tourism studies and indigenous studies, the paper also draws attention to the challenges of framing a protest tour as a strategy for demilitarization. I develop the notion of “souvenirs of solidarity” to reflect on broader issues concerning US bases in Okinawa, Japan and the Pacific and the possibilities for anti-base activism.

The fear of being forgotten that haunts the victims of the Fukushima nuclear disaster set in quickly in the months following March 11, 2011. The Tokyo Olympics, touted as the “Recovery Olympics,” has served as a powerful vehicle for accelerating amnesia, on the one hand justifying the rushed reopening of restricted zones and other decisions of convenience, on the other, programming moments highlighting Fukushima in the Games. As preparations for the latter, especially the torch relay, reached fever pitch, the novel coronavirus intervened to force an abrupt postponement. It also disrupted ongoing and special events planned for the ninth 3.11 anniversary. The essay below elaborates on that context as an introduction to two texts by Muto Ruiko, head of the citizens' group whose efforts led to the only criminal trial to emerge from the Fukushima disaster. The first, a speech anticipating the torch relay, outlines what the Olympics asks us to forget about Fukushima; the second is a reflection on living under two emergency declarations, the first nuclear, the second, COVID-19.

This article critically examines the antislavery activism of Francis P. Fearon, an African activist based in late nineteenth-century Accra. His correspondence with the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) provides a profound insight into the dynamics of African abolitionism. By analysing a collection of letters housed in the APS archive, this study sheds light on Fearon’s commitment to abolishing slavery, driven by his principled opposition to family separation. The article underscores Fearon’s active involvement in a network of African antislavery advocates who sought to disrupt the institution of slavery through legal challenges and international advocacy. This research extends the growing literature on African abolitionism, which primarily focuses on the efforts of African missionaries, educated elites, and grassroots movements, adding a new dimension by exploring the operations of a dedicated network committed to the abolitionist cause.

This article elaborates the notion of hybrid repression, understanding by this modalities of dissidence suppression that involve state and non-state actors interacting in various ways, from fully autonomous to close cooperation. It does so by proposing a framework to scrutinize repressive configurations on the basis of three analytical dimensions – the perpetrator of repression, the tactics used and the threats perpetrators respond to – and using this framework to perform a systematic qualitative analysis of 160 in-depth interviews with human rights activists in four different countries (Colombia, Egypt, Mexico and Kenya). On this basis, the article analytically distinguishes and empirically elaborates four different patterns of hybrid repression, namely: state rogue, corporate, communitarian and non-state armed repression. Our argument challenges the state-centric approach to political repression that still dominates much of the literature on contentious politics and comparative regime analysis, and it invites further research on how hybrid forms of repression manifest and operate in different types of social and political contexts, and in relation to different areas of activism.

In the two decades since the end of Suharto regime in Indonesia, two apparently distinct public industries have emerged in tandem: gendered forms of religious style, glossed as modest fashion, and legal efforts to hold citizens accountable for theft, glossed as corruption. Many of the most high-profile anti-corruption cases in the past decade have brought these two fields into semiotic interaction, as female defendants increasingly deploy forms of facial cover associated with extreme religious piety to signal humility and shame when appearing in court, in the process complicating the relationship between religious semiotics and criminality. Analyzing how and why these two genres of political communication have intersected in the past decade, and to what effects, requires situating these shifts in the context of dense aesthetic archives in which the spectacularity inherent to fashion resonates with the unique impulses of a post-authoritarian political landscape in which uncovering secrets is especially alluring. I argue that the hermeneutic impulses motivating popular fascination with criminal style, often circulated via social media, open new analyses of the ethical relationship between beauty and justice. Building on the scholarship on transparency and on the human face, I argue that putting gendered religious style at the center of the analytical frame—from religious self-fashioning to court appearances, and as forms of political protest—reveals the ethical impulses behind seeing and being seen, and the faciality of scandal.

In recent years, there has been an alarming increase in both proposed and enacted legislation that targets diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within higher education and organizations. These laws aim to dismantle protections and support for vulnerable individuals and groups. In this focal article, we provide an overview of the motives driving these anti-DEI legislative initiatives and categorize the laws based on the type of restrictions they impose: (a) reduction in knowledge, (b) reduction in access, and (c) reduction in support. Next, we discuss the consequences these anti-DEI laws yield for individuals, organizations, and society at large and provide an overview of how individuals and organizations may counteract these regressive policies. Last, we conclude with a call to action for I-O psychologists to investigate and call attention to the consequences of anti-DEI laws for recruitment and selection, well-being and safety of minoritized individuals, organizational reputation, and organizational performance and profits.

Mukti Mangharam’s Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture, conducts a though investigation into the culture and ideology of neoliberal capitalism being produced in India today. But Mangharam’s approach is not to dismiss but to take seriously the appeal of individualism and entrepreneurism among its target audience: ordinary people looking for a way out of the material crises that neoliberalism has produced. In this response to Freedom Inc., Pranav Jani recognizes the empathetic and democratic impulse in Mangharam’s method and narrative style and finds a parallel in his own work as a scholar and organizer. How can scholars and activists concerned with the voice of the people recognize the fundamental heterogeneity of popular consciousness, neither romanticizing struggle nor foreclosing the possibility of reform, or even revolutionary change?