Law and Geography in Urban Asia Workshop

Law and Geography in Urban Asia Workshop, Asian Research Institute, National University of Singapore (In-Person, Zoom, and Hybrid Options)

February 18-19, 2025

APPLICATION DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 30, 2024

How can Asia be understood by the law? Like innumerable other disciplines, the law has long sought to encapsulate Asia’s unique contours in a variety of ways (e.g. Hirschl, 2020; Fukurai, 2018; Eckert, 2004). Taking place in the subdiscipline of legal geography, this workshop – which aims to bring together scholarship on law and geography in urban Asia – wishes to further the legal exploration of the region while simultaneously paying attention to its unique spatiality (Bennett and Layard, 2015). It therefore invites scholars from across a range of disciplines and sub-regions to reflect on the co-relation and co-production of law and urban space in the region.

This workshop, which we believe is the first of its kind, correlates well with recent regional-specific scholarship in the subdiscipline (e.g. Ojeda and Blomley, 2024; Gillespie, Robinson, and O’Donnell, 2024; de Witte, 2022) as well as calls to employ a comparative or even ‘transplantational’ approach to the field in order to pay attention to its diverse pluralities (e.g. Nicolini and Poncibó, 2024; Kedar, 2014; Robinson and Graham, 2018). Although there is no dearth of such scholarship situated in Asia, there has hitherto been no concentrated attempt at bringing its multivarious strands together to understand what makes Asian legal geography unique.

Advancing on these invitations, we deploy legal philosopher Hans Lindahl’s (2013) concept of a-legality or spatio-legal strangeness as a starting point to investigate Asian law and geography. If, as Lindahl proposes, certain unusual spatial practices or behaviours (e.g. the recent climate protests) can produce ‘fault lines’ in a legal order and necessitate its recalibration (e.g. laws criminalising glueing oneself to roads), how do certain entanglements of law and space in urban Asia call into question established conventions and understandings of spatio-legality as historically defined by North American and European scholarship? Concurrently, how do such entanglements also reveal the plurality of legal orders and spatial typologies within Asia? And in doing so, how do they reiterate or interrogate the ability of the law to function as a tool of power and governance at a range of local, regional, and global scales?

To help answer these questions, this workshop remains deliberately open to a range of disciplines and to scholars engaged in diverse understandings of law (e.g. constitutional, property, international, historical, jurisprudence, religion, norms, customs, culture) and Asian urban space (e.g. through geography, urban studies, international relations, architecture, migration studies, infrastructure studies).

Though the focus of the workshop remains on urban Asia, we also wish to highlight that this call for spatio-legal strangeness includes how the non-urban defines the urban. That is, we feel it is equally prudent to pay attention to the hinterlands, the suburbs, or the peri-urban settings that contribute to the construction of the urban, and how the law supports or resists these constructions. We also wish to include the relationship of the urban to global flows and circulations of capital, trade, commerce, technology, and migration, which in turn has led to the creation of economic corridors, special economic zones (SEZs) or exclusive economic zones (EEZs) – which have contributed to discourses on the spatialisation of law in different ways.

Instances of spatio-legal strangeness in urban Asia therefore might resemble (but are by no means limited to) the following examples:

How sites associated with patterns of migration and (in)formal labour – such as Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong or Geylang in Singapore – are subject to various state governance regimes while simultaneously remaining sites of reproduced surveillance
How infrastructures of extraction cross jurisdictional boundaries (e.g. sand importation between Singapore and Cambodia, or the digital and road networks that bring gamblers to casinos in Southeast Asia) highlight the link between law, extraterritoriality, economic development, as well as the opacity of modern corporate sovereignty
How the formulation, development, and construction of new state capitals such as Putrajaya (Malaysia), Naypyidaw (Myanmar), and Nusantara (Indonesia) represent a movement in geographic and political relations as well as a shift in the constitutional balance of power exercised by central/provincial governments over district/city ones

Whether through the transplantation and/or mutability of spaces, laws, or both, such contemporary (and even historical) examples will explain how Asian cities remain connected to and shaped by each other (e.g. through circulations of capital, technology, labour, infrastructures, etc.) as well as the actors and institutions involved in such networks.

It is also our hope to use select contributions from the workshop to put together a specially themed issue for a highly ranked and relevant legal or geographical journal, or possibly expand this to publishing an edited volume. The precise direction will be ascertained during and after the workshop itself.

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract (200 words maximum), and a brief personal biography (about 150 words) for submission by 30 September 2024. Please also include a statement confirming that your proposed paper has not been published or committed elsewhere, and that you are willing to revise the version of your paper presented at the workshop for potential inclusion in an edited volume.

Proposals are to be submitted to valerie.yeo@nus.edu.sg using this template. Authors of selected proposals can expect to be notified by the end October 2024. Workshop presenters will be required to submit short draft papers (4,000-6,000 words) by 10 January 2025. These papers will be circulated to fellow panelists and discussants in advance of the workshop and need not be fully polished. Indeed, we expect that presenters will be open to feedback from fellow participants and discussion at the workshop in order to revise and expand their draft papers for publication.

This workshop will be in person. The Asia Research Institute will provide overseas participants with full or partial airfare funding as well as three nights of accommodation in Singapore. Please indicate in the proposal form if you require funding support.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Dr Dhiraj NAINANI
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

A/P Maitrii AUNG-THWIN
Asia Research Institute & Department of History, National University of Singapore

A/P Kah-Wee LEE
Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore