Land acquisition issues have become an important issue in India in the 21st century, given that its main purpose has shifted, at least in relative terms, from using land for public works such as dams to acquiring land for companies since the economic liberalization of 1991. Against this background, this article explores the formation of the land acquisition system in British India, focusing on the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 and its relation to the Land Acquisition Act of 2013. After confirming that the origins of the land acquisition system can be found in the early 19th century and its basic structure had been formulated by the 1850s, this article attempts to identify and delineate the unique features of the system. First, the government of the East India Company (and later the Government of India) in British India needed such a system in order to acquire absolute right over a piece of land because it had basically guaranteed traditional multilayered proprietary relations over land in Indian society by the end of the 18th century and British sovereignty over the land was legally vague even in the early 19th century. Second, the procedures for acquiring land for railways that were incorporated into the system in the 1850s and those for companies that were introduced in the 1860s were codified as a general clause, which added some peculiarities to the system.

This article examines Japan’s foreign policy toward South Africa in the late 1980s. This was a period when international condemnation of South Africa’s racist apartheid policies was at its highest, and criticism directed toward Japan, one of the major trading partners of South Africa, increased as well. In the late 1980s, the Japanese government strengthened its regulatory measures against South Africa in three phases. In the literature, such Japanese responses have been generally characterized as passive reactions to external pressure from the international community. This article argues that it is appropriate to characterize the first and second phases of additional regulations in the context of policy coordination within the Western bloc, while in the third phase, Japan tightened trade restrictions as a direct response to external pressure from the United States, which was considering introducing sanctions against Japan under the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. The paper also examines the influence of Japan’s engagement with the African National Congress, which was then a liberation movement organization, on the formulation of Japan’s foreign policy toward South Africa. In this analysis, Japanese diplomatic documents that have recently been made public in accordance with the “30-year rule” were examined, along with archival documents housed by universities in South Africa and Japan.

Environmental policies and administration in Taiwan began in 1971 with the establishment of the Department of Health, Executive Yuan (DOH), and its internal organization, the Environmental Health Division, which was assigned responsibility not only for ordinary environmental health issues but also environmental protection and pollution control. This paper argues that the promotion of Taipei City to a Yuan-controlled municipality in 1967 had a major impact on the establishment of the DOH. Before 1971, a small section under the Ministry of Interior was in charge of health administration, while most administrative functions of the Taiwan Area were carried out by the Taiwan Provincial Government. In 1967, Taipei City was elevated to a Yuan-controlled municipality and separated from the jurisdiction of the Provincial Government. This propelled the expansion of health-administration capacities in the central government and led to the promotion of the health administration section in the Ministry of Interior. Originally, the Executive Yuan had planned to promote it as a department within the Ministry of Interior. However, faced with the diplomatic crisis of the late 1960s, the central government of ROC chose to establish the DOH as an organization directly subordinate to the Executive Yuan to promote the achievements of public health policy to the international society. To this end, it became necessary for the Executive Yuan to pass an organizational law in the Legislative Yuan. This paper found that the Environmental Health Division of the DOH, which was not originally envisioned by the Executive Yuan, was the result of the Legislative Yuan amending the DOH Organization Bill. A new legislator elected in the 1969 supplementary election held to fill vacancies, the first election of Legislative Yuan in Taiwan after relocation of the central government of ROC, played a crucial role in amending the DOH Organization Bill. By tracing this process, this paper found that decisions were not dictated by the highest authority but rather were the result of unexpected outcomes brought about by several decisions on other policies and responses to international circumstances.

With political distrust prevailing around the world today, it has been pointed out that intermediate organizations have been weakened as a consequence of their links to political parties, which are the main targets of political distrust. This paper examines whether political distrust is linked to distrust in the Chilean student movement, which remains an important and strong intermediate organization in Chile, a country with serious political distrust. Historically, the Chilean student movement has had the aspect of being part of the political elites linked to party politics through the youth wings of political parties. Today, however, it has the aspect of being a protester against the political elites, breaking away from the established political parties and mobilizing protests against the government. The analysis reveals that although people who do not trust party politics in general are more likely to distrust the student movement, when the student movement severely conflicts with the government through protests, people who do not support the incumbent president are more likely to trust the student movement. This finding suggests that although the student movement, like other intermediate organizations, weakens along with political distrust, it can also prevent such weakening by organizing protests that redirect political distrust into trust in the movement itself.