The introduction to Constitutional Foundings in Southeast Asia Footnote ¹ presents a succinct statement of its aims, opening with the declaration that it “examines the making, nature, and role”Footnote ² of the first Constitutions of 11 countries in Southeast Asia (Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Timor-Leste). The book is an outcome of a 2017 workshop that invited country-specific scholars to present studies on the first Constitutions of each Southeast Asian country. The book called upon workshop presenters to provide papers organized along a common framework of an explanatory description regarding the creation of a country’s Constitution, an explanatory analysis of forces influencing the making of the Constitution, and a reflection on the role of the Constitution.Footnote ³ The composition of the chapter authors confirms the book’s interdisciplinary approach, with contributors reflecting multiple backgrounds spanning history, politics, and law.Footnote ⁴

The scope of the book is delimited in terms of geography, analytical approach, and historical period. As defined by its title, the book focuses on a specific geographic region that has experienced a wave of new Constitutions within the twenty-first century marking significant political transitions. In assembling a collection of individual country studies from Southeast Asia, it implies a disposition towards comparative analysis across its diverse chapters. By focusing on the first post-colonial Constitutions in the wake of each country’s independence, the book places itself as a work of legal history. With such a scope, the book serves what Andrew Harding and Ngoc Son Bui identified as a need for scholars of Asian constitutional law to explore the legacies of pre-modern Asia for purposes of recognizing the diverse constitutional practices across different societies and also understanding the cultural origins of constitutionalism in modern Asia.Footnote ⁵

While Constitutional Foundings in Southeast Asia fills a role in Asian constitutional history, its value is further clarified by reference to the larger literature on comparative constitutionalism. As a field, comparative constitutionalism is broad, since it includes both the study of Constitutions and the study of constitutionalism. Conceptually, the term “Constitutions” refers to statements of foundational law for countries that prescribe the sources and limits on government.Footnote ⁶ Constitutions can be written or unwritten, and can be a single code or a corpus of assembled materials.Footnote ⁷ In contrast, the term “constitutionalism” encompasses the ideas, beliefs, and practices that reinforce the principle that government and government officials are bound by a fundamental law.Footnote ⁸ While related to notions of rule of law, constitutionalism relates more specifically to the binding of authorities by a higher law.

Comparative constitutionalism involves epistemological and ontological components. With respect to epistemology, the field explores different ways of understanding Constitutions and constitutionalism, with scholars employing various approaches in their analyses such as doctrinal studies that look to the reading of texts to glean meanings and implications from their language; entrenchment perspectives that consider how ideas become immune to change, functional research that seeks to determine the role of Constitutions, and constitutional practices in empowering or constraining governments; and sociological approaches that study social constructions of norms embodied in Constitutions and constitutional practices.Footnote ⁹ With respect to ontology, comparative constitutionalism applies comparative methods to improve understanding on constitutional forms, underlying norms, associated politics, or historical orderings.Footnote ¹⁰ Through comparison, it is possible to ascertain convergence or divergence across countries, and hence identify trends in terms of their nature and scale.Footnote ¹¹Constitutional Foundings in Southeast Asia, as an interdisciplinary assembly of scholars in history, politics, and law, largely follows the epistemological directions of comparative constitutionalism, although the emphasis on historical origins trends away from doctrinal textual readings and concerns over entrenchment, and rather more towards functional and sociological considerations. Ontologically, Constitutional Foundings in Southeast Asia favours attention to historical orderings but also encompasses the political contestations, normative developments, and attendant constitutional forms endemic to the countries in Southeast Asia.

A portion of comparative constitutionalism focuses on Asia, with scholars conducting research in Asia as a region, as individual countries, or as a venue for particular issues.Footnote ¹² The narrowing of focus is perhaps understood in comparison to global constitutionalism, which pushes international scope to investigate topics such as the growth of supranational constitutionalism, the spread of Constitutions and constitutionalism across countries, and the development of international standards with respect to the production of Constitutions.Footnote ¹³ In contrast, by fixing its scope upon a specific geographic region, Asian comparative constitutionalism eschews general abstractionFootnote ¹⁴ to adopt contextual approaches that identify norms and conduct held within the disparate cultures of the continent.Footnote ¹⁵ Such a narrowing of scope is in keeping with Ran Hirschl’s observation that the experiences of individual regions are often under-studied and overlooked, in that popular case-studies are predominately tied to Western countries and thus tend to present perspectives biased by a restrictive sample size that too often is inappropriately universalized to the rest of the world.Footnote ¹⁶ While it may be debatable whether Southeast Asia is under-studied or overlooked, the focus of Constitutional Foundings in Southeast Asia targets a specific niche of Southeast Asian constitutional history that serves to enable comparison with the larger literature of constitutional history associated with other regions, thereby helping to compensate for Hirsch’s concerns regarding potential issues of Western bias in broader comparative constitutionalism.

A number of notes should be observed by readers seeking to draw insights from Constitutional Foundings in Southeast Asia. First is the nature of subjectivity bias in qualitative studies.Footnote ¹⁷ In the case of Asia-specific research, there is an added danger of what Andrew Harding and Ngoc Sun Bui label as “constitutional Orientalism” and Teemu Ruskola terms “legal Orientalism” in which Western perspectives are used—by both Western scholars and Asian scholars influenced by Western training—to study foreign cultures.Footnote ¹⁸ Given such concerns, readers should be mindful of what social theorists call reflexivity in terms of acknowledging the reader’s and researcher’s relationship to the topic of study and the associated cultural influences affecting their respective consciousness.Footnote ¹⁹ In addition, readers should also observe the practice of legal pluralists of seeking alternative perspectives to triangulate between different perspectives on a single phenomenon.Footnote ²⁰ In keeping with both bodies of scholarship, readers of the present volume should exercise reflexivity in how each chapter conducts its analysis and should treat each chapter as part of the larger literature regarding the given country. Doing so is consistent with Andrew Harding’s advocacy for Peter Jackson’s theory of “sympathetic engagement,” in which scholars recognize there is no truly objective position and engage in good-faith projects to enrich understanding via constructive discourses between mutually respectful critiques of different perspectives.Footnote ²¹

A second note regards the issues of comparative analysis between broad cross-country versus individual country-specific studies. Broad cross-country comparisons frequently use coding to allow systematic comparison, but this invariably raises problems in translating concepts across different languages that miss out on nuances.Footnote ²² Individual country-specific research, in contrast, has its own challenges in that it requires scholars maintain sustained engagement over long periods of time to grasp contextual details affecting the local exercise of law.Footnote ²³ The differences in the divide are often of magnitudes that exceed the capabilities of individual academics, and so are better addressed through collaborative research, interdisciplinary analyses, and multi-method approaches.Footnote ²⁴ The present volume to some degree fulfils the recommendations for collaboration and interdisciplinary work, and the expectation for multi-method approaches is somewhat mitigated by the book’s stated scope as a treatment of legal history and attendant historical research methods. With respect to individual chapters, however, readers mindful of the above recommendations should treat each chapter within the broader literature regarding each respective country.

A final note relates to a summary overview of the chapters in the book. The volume would have benefited from a conclusion chapter drawing out major points, regional trends, and larger implications from the collective country studies. Based on the orientation of the book towards explanations of the origins, forces, and role of country Constitutions in Southeast Asia, there was the potential to use the author’s contributions to extend themes in Asian constitutionalism construing constitutional practice as normative discourse,Footnote ²⁵ political contestation,Footnote ²⁶ and regime-related outcomes.Footnote ²⁷ In addition, following the historical disposition of the book, it would have been constructive to relate the findings of the authors to various literature dealing with the constructed origins of Southeast Asia, both as a region and as individual countries. In particular, there was potential to tie the chapters into wider histories of colonial constitutionalism, such that the rise of post-independence Constitutions could be seen in relation to past imperial orderings of power.Footnote ²⁸ Further, there was also potential to connect the chapters to the works of scholars like Benedict Anderson and thereby have deeper explorations of Constitutions as products of antecedent imaginings of historical communal identity,Footnote ²⁹ with resulting implications for constitutionalism as a tool for present and future nationalist endeavours.

In conclusion, Constitutional Foundings in Southeast Asia is an informative overview of the constitutional foundings of the 11 countries that comprise a dynamic region that has experienced and continues to experience significant legal change. By exploring the origins, forces, and role of the initial post-independence Constitutions of each country in Southeast Asia, the book collectively serves to inform readers of the complex legal histories in the area. In doing so, it enables comparison highlighting the similarities and differences in constitutional practices across the assembly of countries, and thereby enriches understanding of Constitutions and constitutionalism affiliated with the region. As such, it is a valuable addition to libraries for both areas studies scholars covering Asia and legal scholars engaged in comparative constitutionalism.