In the Indian federal system, the national integration of peripheral regions, such as Jammu and Kashmir and the northeastern states, has been a major concern of the central government. In this article, I investigate the actual situation of the northeastern states, mainly in terms of center -state relations, with special reference to the Sanjib Baruah’s conceptualization of “cosmetic federalism”. Since India’s independence in 1947, the northeastern states have experienced various kinds of turmoil, including violent separatist movements and repression by central government, ethnic conflicts, anti-foreigner movements, and the establishment of local autocracy in some regions. The central government, therefore, has devised several powerful means to control such turmoil, which is not seen in the other states. There is recognition of state status or special autonomous status for the rebellious ethnic groups, massive financial assistance, repressive laws, and other means, which, according to Baruah, have made the federal system of this region superficial. This paper examines the substance of “cosmetic federalism”, including both institutional and non-institutional aspects, on the basis of the concrete data and published materials. It can be concluded that the central government has forced “cosmetic federalism” onto the region, but that the region’s states have adapted to it and sometimes utilize it to their advantage.

This paper examines the political regime as conceived by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through an analysis of the 1954 Constitution-making process. Han Dayuan’s The Constitution-Making Process of the 1954 Constitution (Beijing: Law Press, 2014) is unclear about how discussions on the political regime during the Constitution-making conference affected Chinese politics in the 1950s. Therefore, this paper analyzes the 1954 Constitution-making process by using archival documents related to the 1954 Constitution. As a result, this paper reveals that the confrontation between the CCP leadership, the Soviet leadership, and democratic parties over the political regime during the 1954 Constitution-making process was a symbolic event. It not only amplified mutual distrust but also made clear that their thinking was fundamentally incompatible. Furthermore, this mutual distrust can be understood as a remote cause of the CCP leadership’s anti-rightist campaign against democratic parties and its subsequent confrontation with the Soviet leadership.

How have Japan’s area studies in developing countries accumulated knowledge? How has their structure of knowledge production changed? This paper examines these questions through a citation analysis. Our research has two stages. The first stage was to construct a database. Since there was no database of Japanese literature on social sciences and humanities including area studies, we needed to begin by constructing a database ourselves. The sources of data were the bibliographies of papers and other works contributed to Ajia Keizai from 2002 to 2019. The second stage was to analyze the database regarding the following six questions. First, what are the fundamental features of citations by Ajia Keizai’s papers, such as number of works cited per paper? Second, what are the characteristics of Ajia Keizai as media in this research field? Third, how do the cited works differ in terms of languages used? Fourth, what works, researchers, journals, and publishers were cited most frequently? Fifth, how have the cited works changed chronologically? Sixth, are there any differences in citation behaviors between different groups of source papers? Two findings are particularly notable. First, works in the national and other local languages of the countries where they were produced tended to be used as sources of information, while English-language works tended to be cited as inspiration for questions, origins of approaches, and bases for frameworks. Second, we could not find any obvious differences between the literature cited in the 2000s and that cited in the 2010s. Thus, the results do not support the hypothesis that studies in this research field are becoming more like those in the natural sciences.