1. Introduction
How can Asia be understood by the law? Like innumerable other disciplines, the law has long sought to define or encapsulate Asia’s unique contours in a variety of ways. Indeed, in conceptualising Asia as “a region for our times” (Duara, Reference Duara2010)—such times appearing culturally divided, socioeconomically inequal, and politically fragmented—the law offers several ways to understand the shifting tides and narratives of this vast and heterogeneous place. Constitutional law has, for example, undergone an “urban turn” to look at the role of the Asian metropolis amidst federal, state, and local governments (Hirschl, Reference Hirschl2020), public international law has developed a “Fourth World” approach highlighting indigenous rights in Asia (Fukurai, Reference Fukurai2018), and legal pluralism scholarship has sought to pay attention to urban forms of governance in Asia (Eckert, Reference Eckert2004).
This special issue is framed as a potential response from another legal perspective: that of critical legal geography.Footnote 1 The papers contained herein originate from a workshop entitled “Law and Geography in Urban Asia” that took place at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore in February 2025. Over two days, over 30 scholars from around the region and representing a diverse range of disciplines—law, geography, urban studies, architecture, religion, history, sociology, and anthropology (among others)—gathered to discuss the interrelationship between law and geography within various Asian urban spaces, across a host of cities and countries in the region. The event was a rousing success, in that it advanced scholarly discussion of the field, strengthened regional research networks and opened opportunities for further collaboration, and left the organisers with the happy conundrum of choosing a range of papers that would effectively encapsulate the range of debates and insights that had taken place.
When putting together the initial call for papers, we as organisers had deliberately defined the “urban” as broadly as possible. Moving beyond the attributes and sites commonly associated with “cities,” the “urban” is conceptualised as processes that stretch into its constitutive other—the “rural”—as well as the oceanic and atmospheric, producing patterns of contestations and materialities that point to underlying commonalities. We also emplaced a similar expansiveness to where the law was concerned, and sought to understand it beyond formalised legal systems in the region that contained varying degrees of linkage to their Westphalian counterparts. Therefore, in drawing a large “map” of the law (de Sousa Santos, Reference de Sousa Santos1987), we wanted to also include the likes of social norms, political doctrines, cultural practices, and religious codes. Understanding how these diverse urban processes and legal understandings were entangled, resisted, subverted, paralleled, or disregarded entirely—through lenses such as infrastructure, capital, colonialism, the “inner city,” borders, jurisdiction, territory, justice, cartography, governance, and the state—was at the heart of what we hoped to discover.
In doing so, the workshop was also echoing a larger trend within legal geography scholarship: that of focusing on “the region” or “the area.” If the scholarly aim in the early 1990s (e.g. Blomley, Reference Blomley1994) onwards had pointed towards broadening the conceptualisation of spatio-legality such that understanding the “why” of law would also entail understanding the “where” of it (Bennett and Layard, Reference Bennett and Layard2015), it seems that a certain magnification was taking place 30 years later. As the discipline of legal geography has expanded (Gillespie and O’Donnell, Reference Gillespie and O’Donnell2023), so too has the impetus towards studying “place” (Kymäläinen, Reference Kymäläinen2025) from various angles. Examples of such work have included Colombian legal geographies (Ojeda and Blomley, Reference Ojeda and Blomley2024); environmental legal geographies from the Antipodes (Gillespie et al., Reference Gillespie, Robinson and O’Donnell2024); and spatio-legal understandings of the European Union (de Witte, Reference de Witte2022; Persdotter and Iossa, Reference Persdotter and Iossa2022). In the process, it has become abundantly clear that “[a]s there is no singular legal spatiality, so there must be multiple legal geographies” (Blomley, Reference Blomley, Bartel and Carter2021, p. 18). Recent monographs (Nicolini, Reference Nicolini2022) and special issues of journals (Nicolini and Poncibó, Reference Nicolini and Poncibò2024) have also highlighted the benefit of employing a comparative or even “transplantational” (Kedar, Reference Kedar, Braverman, Blomley, Delaney and Kedar2014) approach in studying legal geography, by paying attention to the multitude of legal and normative systems and spaces that are co-constituted within a particular society.
When the first ever critical legal geography conference took place in Turin in February 2024, it involved a session of several panellists discussing legal geography scholarship in their home countries or regions such as France, Australia, or South America. It was also noted that the lack of representation for other regions, such as Africa or Asia, did not correlate to a lack of legal geography scholarship in said places. Indeed, there has never been any absence of Asian-centric legal geographical scholarship. Early work on Indonesia (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann, Reference von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann2009) and Israel and Palestine (Kedar, Reference Kedar, Holder and Harrison2003) has steadily expanded to include spatio-legal perspectives on Sri Lanka (Schenk and Hasbullah, Reference Schenk and Hasbullah2022), Japan (Yoshida, Reference Yoshida2020), Cambodia (Brickell, Reference Brickell2016; Gillespie, Reference Gillespie2014), Hong Kong (Yip, Reference Yip2020), China (Feng and Li, Reference Feng and Li2019), Singapore (Nainani, Reference Nainani2023; Nainani et al., Reference Nainani, Haines and Thompson2025; Nainani, Reference Nainani, Haines and Thompson2025), Thailand (Robinson and McDuie-Ra, Reference Robinson and McDuie-Ra2017), Pakistan (Gilani, Reference Gilani2015), India (Datta, Reference Datta2012), Kyrgyzstan (Hatcher, Reference Hatcher2015; Cowley et al., Reference Cowley, Ryan and Dunn2015), and the trans-regional Lower Mekong basin (Hensengerth, Reference Hensengerth2024). By no means exhaustive, this list specifically includes work deemed legal geography or at least decidedly spatio-legal by its authors; should it also include those “practicing” (Brickell et al., Reference Brickell, Jeffrey and McConnell2021) it in diverse ways, it would certainly be larger.
Consequently, this special issue—and the workshop that precedes it—seeks to fill a gap both perceived and real: while there clearly is no dearth of Asian legal geography scholarship, the field appears to be overwhelmingly weighted towards European and North American spaces (Gillespie et al., Reference Gillespie, Robinson and O’Donnell2024). Recent interventions that have included a greater degree of Asian-focused scholarship (e.g. O’Donnell et al., Reference O’Donnell, Robinson and Gillespie2020; Robinson and Graham, Reference Robinson and Graham2018), though welcome, have been few.Footnote 2 Therefore, we wish to decentralise and pivot away from the overwhelmingly Anglo-Western hold on legal geographic scholarship, and—through gathering disparate strands of academic work on law and geography in Asia—position Asia as central to the conversation. Moreover, in gathering these disparate strands, we wish to highlight what makes Asian legal geography unique, in all its complexities, contradictions, parallels, and subversions. Rather than using a singular or “grand” theory to explain all of the papers contained in this special issue, we feel it more prudent (and exciting) to gather together work across different spaces and jurisdictions and collectively highlight the characteristics that make Asian legal geography what it is. In essence, we see this as the starting point or invitation to engender a variety of further disciplinary explorations and even their interruptions, rather than a conclusive endpoint through which all is revealed.
2. Theoretical underpinnings
How to (theoretically) define Asia as a region? For Chen, to use Asia as a method is to remember that historical processes of imperialisation, colonialism, and warfare both within and beyond the region have shaped it politically, legally, and spatially, thereby precipitating the need to look beyond Western-derived understandings of statehood (Chen, Reference Chen2010). Duara advocates modern capitalism as yet another driving force that has shaped Asia (Duara, Reference Duara2010); however, in response, Acharya suggests that there cannot be a singular idea of the region (Acharya, Reference Acharya2010), while Hui states that it is filled with contradictions that are at once “colonialist and anticolonialist, conservative and revolutionary, nationalist and internationalist, originating in Europe and, alternatively, shaping Europe’s image of itself” (Hui, Reference Hui2010, p. 987).
This deliberate embracing of multiplicity and ambiguity has been echoed by urban theorists and geographers also seeking to capture the Asian city; in doing so, they offer a sense of the shift and importance of using scale as a way of understanding Asia (as opposed to the use of other spaces or alternative units of analysis). “Urban Asia” is thus simultaneously a geography, a historical construct, an epistemological challenge, and a method. This is not to overly complicate what this issue claims to focus on by hedging against all possible criticisms of simplification. Rather, taking these conceptualisations seriously means that we are always sensitive to both inherited categories of thought and our positionalities as scholars in this part of the world. Encompassing a parallel line of thought, Reference Goh, Bunnell and van der VeerGoh, Bunnell, and van der Veer have proposed that to “do” Asian cities as a geographer is to embrace the reflexivity and subjectivity that comes from one’s individual position and relationship to the urban as an ethnographer, and to find linkages within these rich discoveries (rather than propose a singular model for the Asian city) (Goh et al., Reference Goh, Bunnell and van der Veer2015). This notion ties into a broader history of scholarship that has focused on understanding Asian urbanism as possessing numerous overarching attributes while simultaneously existing beyond convenient categorisation, due to the unique local realities that make up each Asian city (Kong and Law, Reference Kong and Law2002; Bunnell et al., Reference Bunnell, Goh and Pow2012; Perera and Tang, Reference Perera and Tang2013).
In a similar vein, and citing the likes of Chen (Reference Chen2010) and Hui (Reference Hui2010), Michaels seeks to understand what makes Asian law distinctively Asian. He also advocates using Asia as a method, which to him involves understanding Asian concepts of law on their own terms and particularities rather than in relation to the West, and therefore pushes past the widespread assumption that “Western law is universal and Asian law is particular” (Michaels, Reference Michaels and Low2022, p. 28). In doing so, he suggests intra-Asian understandings of law, where the West is just one element of many. In taking up this invitation, other scholars (Erie and Lin, Reference Erie and Lin2026; Kingsley, Reference Kingsley2021) propose that Asian law can be better understood by focusing on its “inter-Asian” elements: that is, the diverse processes, actors, networks, and institutions that facilitate pan-Asian legal workings and frameworks that go beyond the European or American legal systems that have long been transplanted throughout the region.
As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that legal geography has recently turned towards investigating (spatio-)legal pluralism (Robinson and Graham, Reference Robinson and Graham2018), which is concerned with analysing the multiple legal systems (e.g. Westphalian frameworks, village laws, religious norms, indigenous creeds, and even corporate codes) that exist within society. A number of attendant concepts have assisted in furthering the “mapping” of legal pluralism (de Sousa Santos, Reference de Sousa Santos1987), such as: legal layering (where a plurality of legal orders overlap and operate on a single space [Gillespie, Reference Gillespie2017]), interlegality (where space is seen as the confluence of legal formality and informality [Robinson and McDuie-Ra, Reference Robinson and McDuie-Ra2017]), and legal consciousness (which measures how the law influences how people behave and respond to situations [Chua et al., Reference Chua, Engels and Liu2023]). Implicit in all of these conversations is the tracing of where the law is being layered, who is inhabiting the space(s) of such layering, and how they are experiencing the law within those spaces.
To truly comprehend the Asian legal landscape, therefore, is to be aware of both “state” (e.g. courts, police, statutes, legislative bodies) and “informal” law (Chua et al., Reference Chua, Engels and Liu2023) coexisting simultaneously and often unevenly, and to consequently recognise that distinctively Asian notions of religion, custom, norm, dispute settlement, arbiters and mediators, courts, and crime exist beyond Westphalian legal systems. It is also to acknowledge that the relationship between the state and the Westphalian legal system is frequently one of colonial “inheritance,” and that modern legal systems in the region have not sprung from a vacuum (Black and Bell, Reference Black and Bell2011; Ng and Jacobson, Reference Ng and Jacobson2017). Therefore, though not always focusing exclusively on Asia, legal geographers have increasingly begun to notice how a specific site can contain within it diverse and overlapping legal orders and normativities, thereby challenging both the “Western gaze” of law and the longstanding lack of non-Western sites in the field (see, e.g., Robinson and Graham, Reference Robinson and Graham2018). Having overcome its “fear” of both methodology (Braverman, Reference Braverman, Braverman, Blomley, Delaney and Kedar2014) and space itself (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Reference Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos2010), legal geography scholarship currently seems well-placed to embrace the uniqueness of place.
We have also found Lindahl’s work on “a-legality” or “legal strangeness” to be highly useful when embracing the theoretical openness of spatio-legal pluralism as a means of furthering Asia “as method” (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2013). As Lindahl proposes, any legal order will eventually be confronted with behaviours or practices that it cannot regulate—not because these are legal or illegal in nature, but because they are a-legal or strange. For example, Lindahl describes a group of people shoplifting from a supermarket in order to feed the poor; faced with the store’s reputation and the impatience of other customers, the manager eventually lets them leave without any prosecution. Such an act, to Lindahl, is intriguing because it creates fault lines in the way that legal orders govern space. At the same time, it also transforms the space from one sort of “ought-place” (e.g. that of commerce) to another (e.g. that of social activism). In this way, not only does the legal order become confronted with a set of norms and practices that interrupt its formal governance, but so too does the space transform despite materially remaining the same; its subjective or lived experience (Lefebvre, Reference Lefebvre1992) is changed. Confronted with such spatio-legal strangeness, a legal order—and, by extension, the space(s) it governs—must be reconstituted to accommodate these new behaviours. The hope is that in doing so, a more democratic and inclusive form of spatio-legal governance can emerge; one which includes those previously marginalised or forgotten, and allows them to be represented.
Lindahl’s idea of a-legality, while not explicit within all of the papers in this special issue, remains a central theme in its question of interruption and reformulation. How do the plurality of laws contained within the space(s) mentioned here cause change, agitation, harmonisation, or even outright supersession—whether within the framework, the place, or both? And in mapping and measuring these spatio-legal effects, how does our understanding of Asia as a region come to be (re-)defined?
At the same time, we see the special issue itself as part of a broader process of a-legal reformulation within the field. Once perceived as largely Anglocentric in its focus, legal geography scholarship now feels far more expansive in its purview and is flourishing for it. In contributing to this expansion, this special issue extends the field’s longstanding invitation to understand the “splicing” (Blomley, Reference Blomley, Holder and Harrison2003) of law and space through diverse methods (Chiodelli, Reference Chiodelli2025) and sites.
3. Law and geography in urban Asia
In light of the above, the five papers that comprise this special issue speak towards understanding how law within the Asian urban context—specifically, pre-partition Hindustan, modern-day Hyderabad in India, Singapore, Taipei, and Tokyo—cannot be reduced to a homogeneous system of ordering, governance, and control. Instead, any formal framework is constantly entangling with and colliding against historical norms, social practices, more-than-human actors, urban aesthetics, and cultural codes and standards (among other things).
At the same time, the spaces within which these contestations are taking place are also agitated or recalibrated constantly, such that different groups and actors inhabit, occupy, or experience the same space—be it a plot of land, a highway, a concert hall, a public housing block, or a “police box”—in vastly different ways. What the following papers demonstrate is that Asian urban space is constantly shimmering or fractalising; it is constantly being worked upon as much as it is working upon or influencing the “formal” and “informal” laws embedded within it. If the “lawscape” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Reference Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos2015), the “nomosphere” (Delaney, Reference Delaney2010), or the “chronotope” (Valverde, Reference Valverde2015) demonstrate how law and space co-constitute each other, the papers here empirically evince how this process is never a static or mono-faceted process. Here, there is legal as well as spatial layering (where the urban form reverberates or impacts the law at different angles), interlegality as much as interspatiality (where informal and formal urbanism constantly jostle), and legal consciousness alongside spatial consciousness (where human and non-human actors shape their behaviour by their own experience of urban space).
What the following papers offer regarding Asia as a method, then, is a starting point: that it can be considered a site of spatio-legal pluralism. Adopting this lens, in turn, provides a means through which the forces and orders that inform or drive the region can be understood in alternative ways. Whether this is through the prism of colonialism, globalisation, migration, technology, infrastructure, development, order, trade, or a host of others, “seeing” Asia as a spatio-plural region is seeing it as a place filled with spatial and legal collisions, enmeshments, entanglements, and harmonisations, where formal and informal legal systems constantly encounter experiential and subjective urban practices. Observing these encounters across different scales and registers thereby offers the possibility to engage in granular, macroscopic, comparative, cross-regional, and even contra-Asian scholarship. Moreover, the papers featured in this special issue are either largely generative (in that they reflect ideas and concepts within the region) or are illustrative of ideas beyond the region, thereby offering diverse ways of how we approach Asia.
The special issue begins with on a historical note, with Suresh’s (Reference Suresh2026) exploration of how the trigonometrical surveys employed by the British Empire in pre-Partition Hindustan were used as a means of creating jurisdiction through the “scientific enterprise” of cartography. Such a cartography, explains Suresh, both visually framed “India” in the colonial imagination and “flattened” the territory, making it “smoothened” and “civilized.” The crafting of jurisdictional boundaries thereby served to imbue the colonial authorities with a symbolic sense of continuous and ceaseless governance, particularly through the implementation of policing networks that were based on the maps created by the surveys. Implicit in Suresh’s argument is that the land, though treated as devoid of jurisdiction to begin with, contained within it its own customs, norms, boundaries, and hierarchies that were effectively deemed irrelevant by the cadastral and revenue surveys utilised by the colonial authorities. While it is clear that spatial and legal layering—or the messy overlapping of legal and spatial experiences and understandings—does not happen in a void, Suresh’s paper demonstrates how the exercise of (colonial) power can obliterate indigenous forms of law as well as their understandings of jurisdiction and territory, while simultaneously creating a “new” aesthetic ideal.
Annavarapu’s (Reference Annavarapu2026) ethnographic analysis of a fatal motoring accident occurring on a flyover in modern-day Hyderabad in India provides a stark contrast to this unconstrained exactitude of colonial power, however. In conducting a sociological study of how legal consciousness influences and is influenced by spatial consciousness, Annavarapu traces how Hyderabadi motorists engage with the law through the prism of traffic enforcement, particularly in its attempt to regulate speed. She demonstrates that although public discourse and government campaigns play a role in influencing how motorists perceive matters of road safety, rules and disobedience, and even infrastructural aspirations, it is class that proves to be a key signifier through which the materiality of infrastructure is ultimately experienced. Consequently, as Annavarapu explains how the state attempts to negotiate the governance of speed through objects such as tickets, speed bumps, and speedometers, she illustrates how spatio-legal pluralism in Asia can be a materially constituted process. If the previous paper reveals the extent and reach of state power and its creation of legal dominion, Annavarapu makes it clear that even a single stretch of flyover can be governed and inhabited unevenly, and is contingent on how each motorist perceives both urban space and the law.
It is this same tightrope between legality and illegality that Yeo (Reference Yeo2026) explores in her piece on Singapore’s public housing. While Annavarapu looks at decidedly public spaces such as highways and flyovers, Yeo offers a granular look at how urban aesthetics come to be contested between the state and its citizens where the home is concerned, and how the lines between public and private space are blurred as a result. Using Lindahl’s (Reference Lindahl2013) concept of a-legality, Yeo interrogates how boundary-crossings in the spatial and legal sense are attempted by property owners in the decoration of the common corridors outside their public housing apartments, and how municipal authorities intervene in instances which may not be outright illegal, but are considered as spatio-legally strange. These moments of state intervention, suggests Yeo, signal a difference between the normative (or informal) understanding of home ownership and the juridical (or formal) construction of property, thereby evoking a shifting interlegality and interspatiality at play. Using a-legality instead of a binary construction of legality and illegality, states Yeo, allows a degree of nuance in understanding how and why the state chooses to intervene when it does—and even how non-human actors play a role in this decision.
Though Lee and Kang’s (Reference Lee and Kang2026) paper appears at first glance to be quite distinct from Yeo’s—focusing as it does on the construction of data hegemony and digital enclaves in the context of disease governance and concert management in Taipei and Kaohsiung, respectively—there are two commonalities that tie them (as well as the other papers) together. First, both the infrastructural and the non-human remain discrete yet vibrant throughout Lee and Kang’s analysis, whether this is through fibre optic cables, data dashboards, or the COVID-19 virus. Second, while the idea of an urban “aesthetic” may not be central to their analysis, it remains an underlying factor in their survey of state power and spatial governance, albeit in a way that evokes colonial-era jurisdictions in the form of securitised neighbourhoods. In demonstrating how the Taiwanese government walks a fine line between care and control, Lee and Kang offer insights as to the role that Asian technological frontiers such as Taiwan play in framing the region as a site of spatio-legal pluralism. The use of data and technology within the state assemblage—exercised through formal codification, and at times judicially contested—allows for space to be manipulated at unprecedented scales and velocities.
Finally, Rush and Young (Reference Rush and Young2026) complete the special issue by investigating matters of topography (instead of cartography) in Tokyo. In addition to experimenting in atmospheric writing, they provide a detailed undertaking of how legal atmospheres—particularly those centred around criminal justice—arise in Japan by focusing on two distinct spatio-legal constructions: the legal precinct and the koban, or police box. In delving into jurisdictions as places of law, Rush and Young evoke a multi-sensorial approach and offer a topographical methodology that explores the creation of jurisdiction beyond a “law-first” approach by considering the vast array of subjectivities and materialities that are involved in any site. To think atmospherically, they suggest, is to be aware of how a multitude of sites are tied together in a vast assemblage, one that is constantly fluctuating with a variety of aspects that constitute its social geography. Such a relational understanding of place is both human (in its affective emplacement) and non-human (in its recognition of the various materialities that influence such affective responses). In using Japanese ideograms to evince this further, Rush and Young close the special issue in a neat parallel with the visualisation of territory that it begins with.
4. Conclusion
We see this special issue on law and geography in urban Asia (and the workshop that it stems from) as a definitive starting point for many more fascinating conversations. Critical legal geography scholarship has much to offer in terms of understanding space and place, and recent scholarly interventions suggest that there is a great willingness to tackle what makes certain places—be they in relation to cities, countries, or regions—spatio-legally unique or strange. This is evident in the rise of both conceptual frameworks to understand the relationship between space and the law as well as a reiteration of longstanding theories that are used to empirically and qualitatively demonstrate spatio-legal pluralism in action.
The five papers contained in this special issue speak to this established literature on pluralism (whether through a-legality, lawscapes, nomospheres, legal layering, legal consciousness, interlegality, or other means) by exploring various sites across Asia as a means of spatial and legal enmeshment, flux, relationality, subjectivity, harmony, order, and resistance. Cultural norms, social practices, religious creeds, and political codes constantly intermingle with the law as a function of state governance, regulation, surveillance, care, and power, while simultaneously troubling and being troubled by how humans experience, inhabit, and occupy space. Whether such spaces are entire swathes of land, flyovers, and highways, the common corridor linking public housing apartments together, entire neighbourhoods and precincts, or even police boxes and concert halls, there is no one way of encapsulating Asia as a method spatio-legally, but understanding how these sites create place—at different scales and registers, in messy and unpredictable ways—makes our understanding of the region that much richer.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Prof. Tim Bunnell for his support as ARI Director in helping get this project off the ground, as well as Prof. Lynette Chua for all her help and expertise on the editorial front. Our thanks also to Ms. Valerie Yeo, Ms. Minghua Tay, and Ms. Zi Qi Lim for their invaluable assistance in helping make the workshop happen. Finally, our thanks also to all workshop applicants and attendees, including those who agreed to be part of this special issue.
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