Lynette J. Chua

Law and ‘race’ in the citizenship spaces of Myanmar: spatial strategies and the political subjectivity of the Burmese Chinese

ABSTRACT As Myanmar undergoes political and societal transition, observers are asking questions about citizenship and ethnic identity. How does one think about citizenship and peoples negotiations with law in political-legal regimes that do not subscribe to liberal democratic norms? This paper investigates how law marginalizes the Burmese Chinese minority in Myanmar and the nature of their legal participation. Since law asserts cultural power impacting the way people think and behave, we engage with the concept of legal consciousness to understand how perceptions of legal vulnerability shape political subjectivity ambivalently. The paper highlights the spatial strategies and everyday practices that the Burmese Chinese deploy to navigate oppressive laws, but signals that internal social divisions and geopolitical considerations deter collective action towards rights assertion. It argues that studying the multiple sites and scales through which law is engaged contributes towards recovering citizenship aspirations where engagement with power and authority are articulated differently from Western norms.

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

Abstract This 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.