Trousson, Raymond / Vercruysse, Jeroom (dir.), Dictionnaire general de Voltaire. (Champion classiques, references et dictionnaires 18) 1272 p. 2020:10 (Champion, FR) <670-9>
ISBN 978-2-38096-016-7 paper ¥7,064.- (税込) EUR 38.00

Chen, Yu-Hua, Buffer Thinking in Chinese Foreign and Security Policy: The Reasoning behind China's Policies toward North Korea, Taiwan, and Mongolia. (Politics in Asia) 204 pp. 2026:3 (Routledge, UK) <761-896>
ISBN 978-1-041-06155-7 hard ¥46,035.- (税込) GB￡ 155.00

Chen examines China's unwavering foreign policy toward North Korea, Taiwan, and Mongolia, challenging conventional international relations theory. He introduces "buffer thinking"-a geopolitical mentality driving China to secure peripheral territories against potential rivals regardless of global power shifts.Drawing from extensive historical evidence spanning decades, this book demonstrates how buffer thinking functions as an intervening variable that mediates the effects of systemic polarity changes on state behavior. The analysis reveals how this defensive mindset-synthesizing geographical sensitivity, threat perception, and traumatic historical memories-creates a security perimeter extending beyond China's borders. By blending realist perspectives with constructivist insights, it offers a nuanced theoretical framework explaining why China's behavior toward these three states remains "territorially conditional."This is essential reading for international relations scholars and students of geopolitics seeking fresh analytical approaches to buffer state dynamics. It is also a valuable resource for policymakers and diplomats engaged with East Asian security issues who need insights into China's strategic calculations in contemporary great power competition.

Labrecque, Georges, Les frontieres maritimes en Asie. (Inter-national) 395 p. 2025:10 (L'Harmattan, FR) <761-970>
ISBN 978-2-336-52701-7 paper ¥10,598.- (税込) EUR 41.00

Muyard, Frank / Yi-chang, Liu (eds.), Maritime exchange and localization across the South China Sea: 500 BC-AD 500. (Etudes thematiques) 479 p. 2025:10 (Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient, FR) <761-971>
ISBN 978-2-85539-274-5 paper ¥10,340.- (税込) EUR 40.00

Ventresca-Miller, Alicia R., Domesticated: How Cultivated Species Altered Ancient Silk Road Societies. 272 pp. 2026:4 (Oxford U. Pr., US) <761-972>
ISBN 978-0-19-778594-2 hard ¥23,446.- (税込) US$ 105.00

ヘゲモニーの発展－世界秩序と開発のトランスナショナルなフィールド
Abrahamsen, Rita / Williams, Michael C., Developing Hegemony: World Order and the Transnational Field of Development. 208 pp. 2026:7 (Stanford U. Pr., US) <761-261>
ISBN 978-1-5036-4617-9 hard ¥22,330.- (税込) US$ 100.00
ISBN 978-1-5036-4702-2 paper ¥5,582.- (税込) US$ 25.00

At a time of multiple challenges to the liberal international order, development has become one of the most contentious areas of world politics. Dominant powers have reduced their assistance and overtly fused development with national and security interests, while rising powers like China have become major donors promoting new models and norms. Advancing an innovative Bourdieusian-inspired analysis of global politics as interaction between transnational fields, this book places development in the context of contemporary transformations in world order. It traces the history of development as a field of struggle from 1945 to the present, and argues that development is central to the emergence, maintenance, and transformation of world order. The authors show how the global field of development is characterized by a specific form of interest - an interest in disinterest - that performs the social alchemy of converting economic and military power into the symbolic power that is crucial for international hegemony. In the current geopolitical context, the ability of development to produce this symbolic power is dissolving and transforming, making the field one of the crucial sites where attempts to build an alternative global order are emerging and will be historically tested.

Harper-Shipman, T. D., Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics. 232 pp. 2026:7 (Stanford U. Pr., US) <761-263>
ISBN 978-1-5036-4231-7 hard ¥23,446.- (税込) US$ 105.00
ISBN 978-1-5036-4712-1 paper ¥5,805.- (税込) US$ 26.00

Reproductive politics have become acutely urgent as we witness increased sexual and reproductive repression around the world. This reproductive repression is unfolding alongside widespread economic precarity, untenable costs of living, and demands for higher productivity. What feels like the emergence of a novel reproductive and economic dystopia, however, is a long-lasting reality for poor Black women globally. Comparing Senegal and North Carolina, Harper-Shipman shows how states and markets routinely turn to poor Black women's fertility to resolve enduring social and economic crises. Moving through formative moments that draw reproductive health, gender, race, and labor into closer proximity - from the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism through to the present - Harper-Shipman argues that reproductive health policies are essential to understanding international regimes for regulating resource distribution and recreating future stores of differentiated labor across time and space. Unruly Fertility attends to the innovative and unconventional forms of resistance that poor Black women use to decouple their productive and reproductive labor from state efforts to manage their fertility. These discreet forms of resistance establish new possibilities that scaffold decolonial reproductive politics. Harper-Shipman compels us to view reproductive politics as an enduring battle over which bodies deserve the fruits of modernity and which bodies get perpetually marked as the vehicles for carrying all of humanity forward.

Jackson, Peter (ed.), Early Western Missions to the Mongols (1245-1248): The Opening of Diplomatic Contacts with a New World Power. (Crusade Texts in Translation) 408 pp. 2026:2 (Routledge, UK) <761-174>
ISBN 978-1-032-83974-5 hard ¥46,035.- (税込) GB￡ 155.00

The devastation of Hungary and Poland by the Mongols in 1241-2 prompted Pope Innocent IV to dispatch embassies to the invaders, remonstrating with them and urging them to accept Christianity. The papal envoys were Friars - members of the two recently founded Mendicant Orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, who were beginning frequently to serve as instruments of papal policy. Their reports represent the first detailed and largely accurate testimony produced by European Christians about a people, hitherto virtually unknown in the West, who had become masters of much of Asia. Early Missions to the Mongols (1245-1248) thus focuses on a watershed period in the relations of the Christian West with this new and formidable pagan power. It comprises translations of Pope Innocent's letters, together with the limited information available to the papacy prior to 1245; the menacing replies brought back by the Friars; and their reports, which include narratives of their journeys and accounts of the Mongols and their vast empire. The translations are accompanied by introductory material setting the documents in their historical context and by a full commentary.The volume will be of interest not only to students and scholars working on the history of the Mongol empire, but also to those concerned with the early development of the Mendicant Orders, papal policy towards the non-Christian world, the relations between sedentary and nomadic societies in the Middle Ages, and the discovery by the Christian West of distant and extensive regions previously shrouded in myth and fantasy.