Beginning with the opening-up reforms of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese government has treated law as a central tool for regulating the economy and guiding institutional transformation. Over the decades, since 1949, China’s path to modernization has been marked by profound, experimental transformations that selectively combined foreign expertise with Chinese foundations. A key feature of this process has been China’s strategic adoption and adaptation of legal transplants. While initially a recipient of foreign legal models, China is now increasingly exporting its own approaches through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This article examines how China’s engagement in shaping the legal and regulatory frameworks of host countries under the BRI differs from traditional models of legal transplants. Rather than imposing, China draws on its historical experience to adopt a pragmatic, adaptive strategy defined by three core characteristics: the combination of Chinese and Western practices; an emphasis on voluntariness tempered by asymmetrical power relations; and a prioritization of policy objectives over autonomous legal principles. While this strategy raises concerns about legal fragmentation and institutional coherence, it also fosters a space for legal pluralism, offering an alternative to the homogenization typically associated with Global North legal transplants.

Recent controversy around comfort women litigation in Korea illustrates the perplexity of dealing with colonial issues within the framework of international law. A number of victims filed two lawsuits against Japan, requesting compensation for the damages caused in the comfort station. In both lawsuits, the key issue was whether the court should dismiss the case on the grounds of state immunity. Surprisingly, the two courts reached opposite conclusions. The first judgment rejected Japan’s claim of state immunity and announced that the Korean court still holds jurisdiction over the case, while the second judgment dismissed the case by reason of customary international law. Although contrary in conclusion, the rationale of both judgments reflects theoretical confusion about applying the principle of state immunity to an incident that happened between a state and its colony. In neither lawsuits was there an issue of how to represent the damages induced by colonial mobilization. Instead, all the litigants focused on the issue of state immunity. However, since the principle of state immunity is a norm applied between equivalent sovereign states, it does not easily apply to the problems arising from colonial relations. Korea was annexed to Japan as an “incorporated but unequal” part. While the issue was the systematic rape committed against the women in the colony, the identity of Korean comfort women was ambivalent - they were not combatants of the enemy state, but were practically seen as a constituent member of the Japanese military.

In this article, I will analyze the discourse in the lawsuits that reveal the deficiency of jurisprudence in Korea regarding how to address the issue of coloniality. By comparing the two decisions that are opposite and yet similar, I explore how the formalist discussion regarding state immunity veiled substantive issues relevant to the court. Finally, I suggest the possibility of an alternative framework for how the law might accept and address the ambivalent colonial identities of victims, drawing on the International Criminal Court’s Ntaganda case.

Women and Property inheritance is a complex issue in India. The Hindu Succession Laws give women inheritance rights on ancestral, acquired, and agricultural land. This has led to an increase in their bargaining power and a consequential increase in transaction costs, which ideally should challenge the ex-ante and ex-post HSAA 2005, Coasean cooperative equilibriums. While the normative Coasean theorem propounds the dismantling of cooperation with the rise in bargaining, the Hobbesian framework believes that cooperation can exist through coercion. This process, in which women have bargaining rights yet cooperate, happens through “covert coercion.” Despite increased bargaining powers, women are conflicted between inheritance and maintaining familial ties, where covert coercion forces them to let go of inheritance. The article investigates this conflict women face through the lens of Law, normative Coasean and Hobbesian frameworks, psychological costs, and their Lived Reality. Further, this article investigates various efficiency criteria.

The article looks at the question of how property is constitutive of identity. Dominance over material resources and formation of markers of identity are often conjoint processes aided by constitutional processes. We frame the discursive construction of property and public space in India through the judicial discourse on the hijab ban in colleges in the state of Karnataka. Courts often look at space as an autonomously existing physical object rather than a socially constructed arena to which access is granted or denied depending on one’s socio-cultural location. We suggest that this is a natural consequence of over-emphasizing the ‘thingness’ of property as opposed to understanding the discursive and historically contingent nature of property rights. This has a direct relation with how certain identities are allowed the freedom to make public spaces their own while others, though occupying these ostensibly neutral spaces, are not allowed to ‘perform’ their identities.

This paper explores the reasons that divorce petitions by trafficked women in China were denied in courts in the wake of the chained woman incident. The author collected and examined divorce verdicts involving trafficked women from China Judgements Online. Among 100 unique cases, 87 were denied in their first attempts. Most of these cases were treated in the same way as regular divorce cases, with trafficking allegations either blatantly ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. The author argues that the systematic denials and ignoring of trafficking allegations is enabled by a hegemonic legal consciousness within the Circuit of Trafficking that includes not only parties directly engaged in trafficking activities, but also state actors such as the judges and legislators who prioritise “family” preservation and social stability over the rights and well-being of trafficked women. Without addressing and changing this hegemonic legal consciousness, any reform, if it should take place, would be rendered futile in practice.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has advanced in various regions. While analyses have predominantly focused on its political and economic impacts, its legal aspects received less attention. This article explores whether the Chinese legal model implemented via the initiative represents a novel approach to international law-making. The focus is on its application in the Middle East and North Africa, where a set of primary mechanisms are utilised: soft law instruments that establish a theoretical and practical framework for collaboration. The author provides a comparative analysis of the European Union (EU) and United States (US) legal models, considering the overall pros and cons of Beijing’s strategy. The article concludes that while these mechanisms represent a pragmatic governance model relying on flexible rules, they are not a novel approach. The US and the EU have employed such soft law instruments, under which binding agreements were established to ensure formal commitments.

This article tries to understand the role of the idol as a juristic person in the Ram Janmabhumi judgment that resolved the issue of title, following from the Ayodhya dispute. I trace the link between the establishment of the idol as a juristic being and the governance of Hindu property, highlighting the point that an award of personhood to the idol is an award of rights to the community behind the idol. The details of the Ram Janmabhumi judgment show that juridically empowering the community behind the idol in an inter-community conflict has a different texture from an intra-community dispute. The implications of this are explored—first by understanding the nature of the rights created and the conflicts they generate (following the Italian jurist Sforza), and second by understanding this configuration of property rights as a positional good, positional goods being paramount in the production of an economy geared to ethno-nationalism.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a Chinese infrastructure and investment project launched in 2013 that seeks to link China with over 70 countries through transport, communication, and trading networks. The BRI consists of building and construction projects including railways, ports, roads, and other vital trade infrastructure. Importantly, the BRI also includes the establishment of a new “Digital Silk Road” (DSR) enhancing digital connectivity using the latest 5G high bandwidth, low latency mobile and satellite technology. In 2019, several Western states (notably USA, Australia, Canada, and the UK) banned Chinese telecommunications technology companies, such as Huawei, from rolling out 5G networks in their respective jurisdictions. The purported basis for the bans were security concerns over the ability of the Chinese government to control and potentially intercept communications over the Huawei systems. In the MENA region, no such bans have been adopted and the DSR is proceeding to connect MENA economies to China at a rapid pace. This places MENA countries in a precarious position between strategic links with the US as the global hegemon with a strategic interest in the region, and the emerging Chinese global political and economic order. The regulation of digital communication technologies is one dimension where legal frameworks must be designed with care and discernment to balance competing geopolitical forces. This article seeks to answer the question of how best to understand the legal regulation of new technologies in the MENA region and argues that the conceptual lens of “Tech-diplomacy” helps to provide such an understanding. In addition to privacy-centric, security-centric, and growth-centric philosophical and jurisprudential approaches to understanding data regulation, the predicament of the MENA region is a case study in how geopolitics can also inform our understanding of tech regulation.

This paper engages in a comprehensive analysis of the historical processes leading to the destruction of the Original Nations of Belarus and Latvia. The research is structured in three sections, with the first outlining the tribal roots common to both Latvian and Belarusian nations, serving as a foundation for subsequent analyses. The second section constitutes the core of the research, employing an Original Nation approach to dissect the impact of historic occupations in the five key waves—religious conversion, invasions of the Mongol-Tatar Yoke that led to administrative integration into states, a language push under the Russian Empire, identity erasure during Sovietization, and lastly, the restoration of independence in both countries. The last section surveys the modern states of Belarus and Latvia, emphasising their endeavours to revive their Original Nations, as both nations share the burden of recovering lost national elements, resisting cultural repression, and building a robust national identity.

This article examines interactions facilitated by legal pluralism in contemporary urban India. Employing a framework of semi-autonomous social fields, I focus on use rights exercised over “Waqf” properties and the role social fields so generated play in facilitating access to property rights for groups without social and economic capital. Viewing property through a relational lens and relying on the method of examining “trouble” disputes, I discuss two long-term disputes in a Sufi shrine of an urban village called Mehrauli, Delhi. I will advance two main arguments in the article. First, the operation of formal and informal legal orders forms a generative ground making access to resources more equitable. Second, formal and informal legal orders interact to form a dialectical relationship, such that it becomes difficult to tell which of the two is superior.

Sino-Arab Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) have remained elusive over two decades of increasing economic relations and trade negotiations. Nevertheless, substantial investments and trade demonstrate the Arab region’s strategic importance to China. Recent strategic drivers of China’s engagement with the Middle East have evolved from an original energy security focus, to more recently integrating technological investments into partnerships, such as artificial intelligence and renewable energy infrastructure—complicating progress towards an FTA. Such measures can help progress achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and offer economic development opportunities, but negotiations may be hindered by concerns ranging from technological dependency to trade competition. Examining opportunities and challenges in the developing China–Arab relations, the article explores legal and policy obstacles and opportunities towards securing an FTA. With a focus on recent developments in AI and sustainability partnerships, the article analyses legal strategies and international law best practices for a model FTA for Arab countries.

The dispute of married out women has become an important modernisation problem since the 1990s as the result of urbanisation and industrialisation. It concerns social stability at grassroots that may affect the ruling base. While the Chinese government is constantly striving to solve it, it also shows how deficient the protection of women’s property rights is that it causes so many controversies. Currently, the cultural explanation that simply attributes the phenomenon to traditional patriarchal culture is popular among scholars and widely accepted, which is, however, proved to be misleading. This article attempts to break this stereotype and points out that this trouble is not directly related to Chinese traditional culture. Rather, it is caused by the majority’s tyranny under the current villager self-government and collective property rights. This article also attempts to find possible solutions, requiring improving the rural self-government system and clearly defining the boundaries of collective property rights by law.

Businesses from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) aiming for a global reach must navigate through different levels of rule of law—with different degrees of strength—to access foreign markets. The rule of law is essential from a business perspective as it reduces the costs of transactions on the global market. However, the paper aims to demonstrate that there are transaction costs due to the frictions between the rules of law in the multilevel system, which the MENA business must take into consideration in its search for contract partners and new markets. The focus is on the overall rule of law components of the World Trade Organization, the European Neighbourhood Policies, and the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and their interaction.

The widening inequality and discontent concern every economy irrespective of any measure of economic prosperity. The contest and debate centred around the notion of private property, assumes the premise that property is a legitimised unfettered accumulation with a right-based justification. On the contrary, the Gandhian conception of property, tries to reframe the premise that property is social and needs to be justified over its obligatory commitments. I argue that Gandhi’s engagement with property relations reflects the individual pursuit by socialising property. From problematising the individual property rights within the Anthropocene world, the article mapping a Gandhian theory of property identifies the normative structure of property. The individual as the custodian with normative obligatory commitments can foster pluralistic interest while anchoring the ethical foundations of property rights reflecting social justice.

There are several examples of collective action/social movements for the environmental cause in India. The literature on environmental governance and environmental economics, identifies a significant role of the nature of environmental goods with respect to the twin classifying criteria of rivalry in consumption and excludability. The common pool resource and public good nature of environmental property require varied governance approaches. These economic theory-based classifications can be associated with diverse types of property rights regimes in the legal realm. By developing an analytic narrative, this article attempts to identify how common individuals related with environmental movements, identify some of these nuances with respect to nature of environmental goods and associated property rights regimes and develop strategies for improvements. This article utilises secondary qualitative data to examine the perspective of common individuals, groups, and leaders of environmental movements to infer theoretical learnings from a few cases in India.