Charting Socio-Legal Scholarship on Southeast Asia: Key Themes and Future Directions

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses the state of socio-legal scholarship on Southeast Asia and situates the special journal issue in relation to its key patterns, emerging trends, and future directions. Southeast Asian literature in leading socio-legal journals exhibits an imbalanced geographical coverage and tends to cluster around research on state law’s intersection with Islamic and/or customary norms, women’s equality and legal status, and land and the natural environment. These prevailing patterns lead to uneven attention paid to Southeast Asia. However, growing bodies of work along the major themes of legal pluralism, law and development, and dispute processing show the potential of Southeast Asian research to advance important debates and sub-fields in the scholarship at large. Proposals from a December 2012 workshop initiative further identified research directions that could enrich this field of study as well as understandings of law-society relations in Southeast Asia.