The term “customary law” is a label given by outsiders to what is simply the “law” for the local people. This article proposes an analytical framework for the case studies in this special issue in observing the normative contests through land and forestry dispute resolution in Asia and Africa, as a challenge to a changing regime of positive law under the pressures of contemporary “legal transplant.” A comparative view across jurisdictions may tell us the commonalities as well as the variation of the modes of normative modification through dialogues. As an attempt to demonstrate such an analytical approach, this article looks into the cases of normative resistance by local communities, similarly facing the eviction orders in the context of post-disaster reconstruction: in post-2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, and Moken villages in southern Thailand; in the post-2013 Typhoon Yolanda in Leyte, the Philippines; and post-2011 tsunami-affected communities in the East Japan.

Building on the scholarly work on global phenomena of what Scheppele (2018) has termed “autocratic legalism”, and in particular those studies that have examined the creation of dual law, we focus on the making of majoritarian legal orders in India. Speaking of ‘autocratic acts’ suggest a top-down process of already constituted authority and conceals the social preparation of such legislative change. To speak simply of ‘authoritarian’ orders, equally obscures the selectivity of restrictions of rights, since many of these orders are in many fields and for many of their citizens still liberal. We therefore speak of the co-production of majoritarian legality. In this editorial essay, we argue that the making of majoritarian legality realises a new raison d’état, which normalises the partisan use of laws, the authoritarian oppression of dissent through existing laws, and the inauguration of differential citizenship regimes. Thereby a dual law situation is elevated from the level of misuse and abuse of means to the actual purpose of the state, the raison d’état being the establishment of a Hindu majoritarian nation-state.

This article engages with two aspects of how cartography enabled law and jurisdictional ordering in a specific historical context. First, by interrogating the ways in which the great trigonometrical surveys of the British colonial enterprise and the Atlas of India entrenched “India” as a distinct, coherent, and contiguous geographical entity, this article will demonstrate how an epistemology rooted in a civilising impulse produced the perception of India as a thoroughly refined British legal territory. Second, by engaging with the maps and records of colonial cadastral and revenue surveys, this article will show how maps played a critical role in the visualisation of British Indian territory in terms of police networks. Such a visualisation paved the way for the rationalisation and systematisation of horizontal jurisdictions, with vertically aligned hierarchies, across the territory.

This paper is an act of remembrance, a testimony to the horrors inflicted on our lives and bodies as women prisoners of Tihar Jail No. 6, Delhi. It documents the struggles for life and survival of fellow women prisoners, and bears witness to the deaths of Fiza and Jesca. Through these experiences, I argue that the measures introduced in the lockdown prison during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic did not merely respond to a public health emergency, but inaugurated a field of penal experimentation that emboldened existing practices of custodial violence and sought to establish a new regime of impunity aligned with Hindutva politics. I demonstrate how isolation cells came to function as de-facto solitary confinement, how the jail manual was effectively suspended, how the right to life was stratified into hierarchies of “deservingness” by High Powered Committees, and how daily prison life was restructured through intensified surveillance.

The erosion of international law is not unique in today’s world. Its crisis of legitimacy is characterised by polarisation in world affairs, declining trust among actors on the international plane and competing claims to authority. Existing perspectives on international law and international relations explain this erosion only partially since they overlook the relational processes through which international law acquires meaning and binding force. This article introduces the Theory on the Relational Normativity of International Law (TORNIL), which reconceptualises the sources of international law’s normativity as arising from the interaction of formal rules, moral values, and relationships— between actors concerned with and affected by its application and development—characterised along a continuum of trust and distrust. By operationalising this framework through the practices of principled negotiation, the article advances a relational understanding of international law’s normativity and offers a pathway for rebuilding legitimacy and trust in global governance.

This study examines how Egyptian law recognizes and deals with land that is stipulated as state property, but has been informally used and/or acquired by individuals as private property. A case in point is Warraq Island in Egypt, whose land became the target of the government’s initiative to remove illegal occupations on the so-called state-owned land. In July 2017, government forces arrived on the island to enforce the order, but they encountered fierce resistance from the residents. Since then, both parties have been involved in negotiations to agree on a viable solution. It is important to note that in Egypt, the state often exerts control over the legal system, based on its own interests. However, such actions tend to fail in light of legal challenges by various actors or widespread demonstrations that may not be legally sanctioned.

In this paper, I trace the social life of law as it shapes—and is shaped by—quotidian motoring practices in urban India. While laws, rules, and codes that regulate humans and vehicles exist on paper, scholarship on how motorists and state actors understand, interpret, and enact these laws is still scant. In the backdrop of a continued public discourse around road safety, rule-disobedience, infrastructural aspirations, and class inequality in the country, how does law mediate driving (and riding, henceforth) in cities? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, this paper analyses how motorists make sense of traffic law enforcement (with particular focus on speeding) and how these interpretations orient motorists vis-à-vis the everyday state and the city. The material, structural and infrastructural conditions of driving, I ultimately argue, produce situational and contingent relationships to traffic laws and to the state.

This paper seeks to question the strict separation between liberal and authoritarian legality by revealing the fictions and contradictions of liberal law necessary to maintain its order and the authoritarian practices involved in sustaining it. Bringing forth stories of carceral labour of women prisoners in an Indian prison who bear witness to authoritarian logics of punishment and animating spaces of legal ambiguity occupied by this labour, I draw out this dialectical relationship between liberal law and its authoritarian practices. I also demonstrate how carceral labour serves to construct labour and its subject outside prison as “free” (notwithstanding its actual conditions and relations of coercion), sustaining a seductive dichotomy between “free” and “unfree” labour. Both materially and psychically, the liberal rule of law asks us to deposit “unfreedoms” in prison and its practices so that the fantasy of the free liberal subject with rights and citizenship is sustained.

The growing pace of artificial intelligence (AI) in Asia has changed the nature of human–machine interaction. This article builds on the idea of “relational protocols” that are normative and procedural systems that govern the growth of co-developmental AI systems, as they are developed in an iterative fashion with human users. Through comparative jurisprudence, the article analyses the difference in frameworks between four Asian legal systems, China, Singapore, Japan and India, each of which has its own cultural logics, constitutional orders and administrative traditions. Article critically questions the idea of the “mediation of conflict” between administration and individual communicative rights by using a normative analysis of each jurisdiction. Based on the results, there is a need for more than just technical efficiency in AI governance in Asia; relational accountability, cultural sensitivity, and meaningful human oversight must also be incorporated in designing the human–machine dialogue.

This study explores the complexities of land formalization and the ongoing struggles for land justice among the Îgembe of the Kenyan Central Highlands. It begins by reviewing the prevailing argument that the formalization of land rights contributes to socio-economic growth and tenure security in the Global South. The study highlights the relational nature of rights in different contexts in African countries and discusses both the evidence and the scepticism surrounding land formalization. While the aim was to restore land rights to local people from colonial powers, the introduction of land registration in Kenya allowed political elites to appropriate land. The Îgembe people, having experienced land injustice in their local socio-historical context, have navigated the complexities of land disputes using indigenous institutions alongside state legal processes. I argue that success in land disputes often comes from a combination of personal courage and the use of both indigenous and formal legal frameworks.

AI in clinical decision-making challenges liability frameworks grounded in subject–object dichotomies, linear causation, and atomised attribution. Drawing on relational responsibility, this article argues that the human–machine association, rather than the AI system or clinician alone, should be treated as the fundamental decision-making unit. Responsibility should therefore emphasise interaction quality, harm prevention, and relationships that sustain future cooperation. The article proposes dialogic responsibilities for technology providers, medical institutions, clinicians, and patients. For external compensation, medical institutions should act as the primary responsibility hub, reducing patients’ burden of proof while retaining rights of internal recourse based on specific human–machine interaction patterns. Internally, liability should reflect calibrated trust, documented dialogue, and the respective commitments of technology providers and clinical users. It thereby promotes accountable collaboration throughout the clinical AI lifecycle. By linking physician–patient trust with algorithmic trust, this relational framework seeks to reconcile technological innovation, professional autonomy, and the protection of patients’ rights.

This article explores how low-level bureaucrats in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand both construct and feel for “endangered” Hindu subjects in ways that profoundly shape their legal practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from rural Uttarakhand, I suggest that focusing on the sociohistorical production of embodied feeling among bureaucrats allows us to understand the incremental, almost unremarked, remaking of law along majoritarian lines. I situate this inquiry in a social and political context marked by violent suspicion of religious minorities, especially Muslim men. Tracking bureaucratic anxieties around love jihad specifically, this article engages the following questions: How are state conceptions of justice, victimhood, and culpability shaped by particular embodied affects which, in turn, are moulded by contingent historical regimes of identification and suspicion? Through what socially resonant attachments and disavowals does this structure of feeling and thinking come into being? How do the emergent, contingent feelings of state actors shape the everyday acts of storytelling, interpretation, and evaluation that make up the reading of a legal case?

Socio-legal studies on legal boundary-crossing provide accounts of how states and individuals negotiate the spatial relation between them in terms of legality/illegality. However, situations which present as both legal and illegal can unfold in ways which escape analytic capture by this polarity, posing a challenge to these approaches. In this paper, I examine examples of personal use of the common corridor by public flat owners in Singapore to test the explanatory power of Hans Lindahl’s concept of a-legality in deepening our understanding of boundary-crossings which take place in Singapore’s public housing blocks. I argue that in these situations, a-legality exposes a social and cultural latitude present in the lived experience of the relation between the social concept of ownership and the legal concept of property which would not be visible through an (il)legality analysis.

The Indonesian government has alternately ignored and respected the customary land rights of local people in its land policies since colonial times. Since the start of democratisation at the end of the 1990s, the trend to uphold customary land rights has become apparent at the national level. This study examines their status in the field, using the case of land grabbing on Padang Island, Riau Province, Indonesia. The findings include the company’s continued practice of purchasing land areas from local people at a lower price, not as compensation, because the company has not yet recognised the customary land rights. However, the local people contest the negotiation for a higher price through the newly introduced transparent practice of land transactions, involving village officers. The recommendation by the Mediation team to respect customary land rights is thus still a work in progress.

This article examines how majoritarian domination—as a constitutive feature of global democratic decline—is produced and entrenched through everyday judicial practices. Focusing on Assam, India, where denationalisation policies threaten millions—particularly Bengali-origin Muslims—within a political climate saturated by suspicion and hostility, it draws on an unprecedented empirical study of more than 1200 rulings of Assam’s High Court since 2009. The article develops the theoretical prism of legal work to show how judges encode majoritarian domination through both the exercise and withdrawal of judicial labour. Exercised judicial labour produces suspicion, visible in doctrines of evidence, reliability, and juridical truth that construct minority identities as presumptively fraudulent and foreign. Withdrawn judicial labour produces silence, as courts refuse to record, engage, or reason, rendering minorities legally invisible. The article advances a novel methodological and theoretical framework for understanding how courts routinise hierarchy, making authoritarianism both durable and legally sanctioned.

This paper empirically examines the conflict between official and unofficial law, focusing on cases where discrepancies arise between registered titleholders and owners based on customary rights in Japan’s common forests. In Japan, compliance-oriented legalization has progressed, and recent legal reforms have framed common forests with irregular registrations as “abandoned lands with unknown owners.” Interviews with commoners revealed a weakening confidence in their customary rights, leading to a lack of resistance to demands for registration regularization. However, a nationwide survey of forestry cooperatives showed that common forests are often well-managed due to economies of scale. In practice, legal relationships are frequently established with representatives of commoner groups, bypassing the need to trace all heirs of outdated titleholders, thereby mitigating the tragedy of the anti-commons. However, this practice stems from the high costs of complying with official law and does not signify a revival of customary rights. In fact, forestry cooperatives that placed emphasis on registration were confronted with difficulties in managing common forests.

Taiwan’s urban data governance reveals how concentrated data control creates spatial power through subtle mechanisms. This article introduces “data hegemony” and “digital enclaves” to examine COVID-19 surveillance in Taipei’s Wanhua district and concert management in Kaohsiung. Wanhua demonstrates coercive data hegemony—comprehensive surveillance under emergency powers that create visible harms (healthcare denial, spatial stigmatisation, and economic losses)—which enables civil society to contest through legal challenges. Kaohsiung demonstrates service-integrated data hegemony—surveillance embedded within service provision delivering genuine improvements (efficient crowd management, optimised facilities, and economic benefits) that foreclose contestation through satisfaction. This framework addresses critical gaps in privacy-centric and state-surveillance approaches by capturing how algorithmic categorisation produces collective spatial effects transcending individual privacy violations, with implications for democratic oversight in digitised cities.

Observing the high compliance rates of tech giants with judicial suggestions from Internet courts in China, this article supplements Galanter’s thesis by reconsidering the extent to which repeat players inherently dominate litigation outcomes over one-shotters. Drawing from theories of relational contracts and governance, it proposes a theory of relational adjudication that not only explains the compliance phenomenon but also offers new insights into the high success rates of repeat players. This theory suggests that courts, acting as “repeat referees,” leverage long-term interactions to encourage greater compliance and improve litigation outcomes among these players. Central to this cooperative dynamic are reciprocal expectations and frequent information exchanges. Contrary to traditional views, within a relational governance framework, court intervention extends beyond case-by-case decisions to include systematic compliance advice, thereby integrating legal risk prevention into daily corporate practices. However, potential drawbacks such as risks to judicial credibility and integrity warrant careful consideration.