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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

This paper purports to identify the origin of farmland disputes in Myanmar triggered by the 2012 land law reform, and the attitudes of mediators. While 120 interviewed farmers showed a strong perception of the traditional right of farming to their ancestral land Bobwapaingmyae, the land administrators believe such a traditional right was lost with the formal registration of “cultivation right.” To fill such a perception gap, village mediators apply a legal pluralist view that both rights can exist in parallel. Once, however, a farmer separates his “cultivation right” from Bobwapaingmyae and places it in the market through sales or mortgages, the disputes come under the formal system where legal positivism governs. But the authors found the tendency of formal forums which affirm the claims of Bobwapaingmyae lacking the registration upon the proof of “actual cultivation,” revealing a legal postulate that sustains the substantive value of livelihood protection upon a condition of formalistic appearance of the asserted right, as a compromise between plural legal regimes.

This paper advances current debates on majoritarian state-making by bringing into dialogue theoretical debates on linguistic polysemy, legal hermeneutics, and digital authoritarianism. It analyses hate speech accusations in India as a polysemic discourse, which allows majoritarian regimes to create new public hierarchies of interpretation that equate “hate speech” with critique of Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) ideologies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography with legal professionals, police, and hate speech accused in North India, the paper analyses how adherents of India’s Hindutva government mobilise a dual strategy of online virality and procedural, judicial dismantlement to create a system of majoritarian legal hermeneutics: a self-reinforcing complex of interpretation that exploits the indeterminacy of legal terminologies to imbue criminal provisions aimed at safeguarding equality with anti-democratic meanings. In the process, legal actors are turned into active participants in the creation of a public of wounded Hindus that views minorities as a threat to their identity.

In this paper, I argue that the 2021 update to Facebook’s Community Standards on hate speech that distinguishes between “attacks on people” and “attacks against concepts and institutions” represented a shift in Meta’s content moderation policies from a consequentialist United States First Amendment influenced view of free speech to a constitutive approach that is responsive to the “real-world” harm of the virality of hate speech online in contexts such as India. To illustrate this argument, I focus on Meta’s response to “attacks against Islam and The Prophet” that are regularly used to attack Muslims by Hindu nationalists and their supporters, in India and abroad. The weaponisation of hate speech and the virality of speech-acts afforded by Facebook and other platforms by Hindu nationalists and their supporters to subordinate minorities and dissenting voices is one of the many contemporary practices that have contributed to the production of majoritarian legality in India.

Compliance with court decisions is essential for the rule of law. Generally, regimes comply with decisions that serve their interests; however, compliance with decisions against government interests is less certain. In 1947–2005 and 2014–2023, the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SCP) decided many politically important cases in favour of the prevailing authoritarian and hybrid regimes. However, between 2005 and 2013, although the SCP reached decisions against the government’s interests in politically important cases, the government still complied. Why would authoritarian and hybrid regimes, such as those in Pakistan between 2005 and 2013, comply with decisions in politically important cases that were against their interests instead of disobeying or ignoring them? Very few studies have addressed this puzzling phenomenon. This article argues that increasing public support for courts coupled with reinforcement mechanisms—supported by both the judiciary and external actors—contributes to such compliance. The article concludes that a combination of social, political, and legal factors is essential for compliance by authoritarian and hybrid regimes in politically important cases.

Recent years have witnessed a “juridical turn” in Chinese environmental governance, emphasising and encouraging legal mobilisation and litigation deployment by citizens to address environmental grievances in either individual or collective forms. This legalisation movement has spawned a budding, socio-legal field of Chinese environmental justice (CEJ), with an ostensible trend towards the legal empowerment of community organisations as “autonomous” litigants representing public interests. Drawing on extensive qualitative data, this study examines how plural, fluid state–society relations are manifested, animated, and permeated in the interactive processes of the CEJ. The analysis reveals four emergent modes of political–organisational connections—the state’s challengers, allies, servants, and subordinates—all of which depend on how the Chinese state interprets their motives for using the law and engaging in litigations, and anticipated effects their legal mobilisation can generate or diffuse in society. The bounded community mobilisation within the CEJ has also embodied the continuing state supremacy and the growing legal responsiveness in the Chinese approach to modernisation. Future theoretical and policy implications for the participatory effectiveness of community organisations in the CEJ are also discussed.

How do lawyers understand legality in contemporary India? We examine the experiences of lawyers in Delhi, who defend people accused under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), statutes increasingly deployed to target dissent and minority groups. Drawing on in-depth interviews, these trials produce a sense of normlessness—where foundational assumptions about rules, processes, and institutional roles collapse. Lawyers describe an “alien” legal world marked by unpredictability, an absence of established procedure, and blurred boundaries between judges, prosecutors, and police. While ordinary cases retain a sense of normality, UAPA and PMLA cases destabilise imaginations of the legal process, compelling lawyers to speculate on motives and majoritarian influences. We explore how lawyers respond through insistence on procedural norms and strategies to mitigate harm to clients. These narratives illuminate the transformation of legality into a contingent, shape-shifting form of power, challenging deterministic accounts of authoritarian legality

On grounds of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi between 2021 and 2023, this paper analyses 20 cases of police violence, which occurred during the December 2019 protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. I argue that majoritarian practices of policing, through legal and extra-legal mechanisms, “unmake” the victims of violence. Instead, police procedures frame victims as perpetrators. The unmaking of the victims and subsequent criminalization occur through layers of discursive, procedural, investigatory, and legal strategies employed in everyday policing. In a Kafkaesque turn in law and society, I identify the omissions, exclusions, and invocations that result in a devastating deprivation of justice.

This study presents a mixed-methods analysis of the integration of social justice into legal practice in Hong Kong. While social justice within the legal field is a growing area of interest, research on how it can be enhanced through legal education remains relatively limited. This study aims to explore how higher education law courses can be leveraged to better incorporate social justice principles into contemporary legal practice. The research adopts a mixed-methods approach, including a quantitative analysis of questionnaires completed by 99 current law students in Hong Kong and a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with 33 students and legal professionals in the region. Findings suggest the potential benefits of increasing the emphasis on social justice within law programs at Hong Kong universities. The study also raises important questions about the optimal content and methods for delivering social justice education in legal curricula.