As the French empire expanded throughout northern and western Africa and from Pondicherry in India east to Royal Vietnam, a new secular mission came into being, one married to the contradictions of aggressive imperialism, a revolutionary past, and democratic governance. Civilisation was elevated to the rarefied realms of imperial law. French colonial administrators and jurists equipped with the prejudices of the metropole carried with them a powerful vision of republican empire to the Mekong, the great river system that lies at the proverbial heart of mainland South East Asia. Yet republican colonialism was undermined by below. In Indo-China, young radicals, jurists, politicians, journalists and scholars engaged in bitter fighting with the creation of a panoptic model of state surveillance, economic exploitation, political repression, racism and the ambiguities of French republicanism. From the creation of the Indo-Chinese Union in 1887 to its demise in 1954, the multiple transformations of legal boundaries in Indo-China reflected the evolving international relations and anti-colonial agitations in Asia. They formed a crucial conjecture in the history of international law.

Although rarely acknowledged, Buddhist monastics are among the most active lawmakers and jurists in Asia, operating sophisticated networks of courts and constitutions while also navigating – and shaping – secular legal systems. This chapter surveys the entanglements of Buddhist monastic law and state law in Sri Lanka while also providing a general overview of Sri Lanka as a multi-religious, multi-legal site. It introduces readers to the key methods and arguments advanced in this book, including arguments about how and why one should analyse legal pluralism ‘as a practice.’

How is monastic law practised in modern-day Sri Lanka? How do contemporary monastic jurists reckon with multi-legality? This chapter draws on archival and ethnographic research with Sri Lanka’s third-largest monastic community, the Rāmañña Nikāya, to answer these questions and explore the operation of monastic law today. It introduces readers to the Rāmañña constitution, court system, judicial training materials, jurisprudential texts and other features of monastic legal practice. It argues that monastic judges practise legal pluralism in ways that both resist and embrace the parallels between monastic and state law, engaging in a form of ‘double speak’ that, on the one hand, places monastic law ‘on the scale’ of Sri Lankan law while, at the same time, highlighting its superior, more-than-human status.

How should scholars and policymakers think about legal pluralism? In this Conclusion, I reflect on that topic, insisting that analysts should move beyond the question of whether laws, themselves, are or are not compatible. Instead, they should look at the practices of legal pluralism that make such compatibility seem natural or permissible, exceptional or impossible. I argue that inter-legal harmony is not a technical feat, but a social, political, and emotional achievement – one that is often precarious. Legal pluralism, therefore, implicates more than just the ‘stuff’ of law, but involves the shifting and recursive processes that help us to assemble normative worlds, reckon with diverse obligations, and find meaningful pathways forward through a changing and complex life.

Sri Lanka is the only Buddhist-majority country in the world without an official state-recognised monastic legal system. This is in spite of the fact that an entire section of the county’s constitution is dedicated to such a venture. How can one explain this? And why does Sri Lanka remain in this impasse? This chapter answers these questions by tracking a significant (and ongoing) series of attempts made by Sri Lanka’s leading intellectuals, educators, politicians, monks and legislators to ‘legalise’ monastic law (S: nītīgata kirīma) by creating some form of statute, tribunal or legal body that could blend monastic and state legal authority. Drawing on an un- and under-studied body of political and legal documents, it explains how a particular approach to legal pluralism – one motivated by a ‘purist’ approach to law – both motivated and sabotaged successive efforts to formally recognise monastic courts and constitutions in state law.

What is monastic law for? This chapter explores the goals of monastic law, beyond its concerns with regulation and governance. Drawing on ethnographic, archival and survey research, it examines the various ‘nonpositivist’ aims pursued by monastic jurists: preserving unity and unanimity (sāmaggi) among monks; maintaining discretion and protecting reputations; avoiding (further) conflict and identifying the root causes of strife; minimising judicial prejudice by eliminating the mental defilements (kilesa) that give rise to them; restoring offenders to the community by applying therapeutic sanctions; aligning the conduct of monks with the concerns of local laity and temple donors; and, most importantly, shortening saṃsāra and hastening nirvana. This chapter highlights the intertwining of positivist and nonpositivist elements in monastic law, shining light on a legal order that not only enforces standards of conduct but also impacts karma, saṃsāra and the path to nirvana.

Why do similar conditions of legal pluralism lead to conflict in one setting and compromise in another? This chapter addresses this question by approaching legal pluralism not as an empirical condition – a multiplicity of legal orders that individuals navigate – but as a set of practices that bring order, structure and meaning to the obligations, codes and norms that one confronts. Drawing on three relatively recent case studies, this chapter demonstrates how the same set of normative artefacts – the same texts, norms, institutions, and authorities – can be assembled, interpreted, and mobilised in profoundly divergent and even agonistic ways. The first case study involves a monk’s attempt to gain a driving license. The second involves the issuing of identity cards for Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs). The third relates to a parliamentary bill designed to recognise monastic constitutions (katikāvatas) in law.

How does the encounter between monastic law and colonial law look from the perspective of Buddhist monastics? The chapter offers an alternative legal history of the nineteenth century, drawing on a largely unstudied archive of Sinhala- and Pali-language legal sources written by Buddhist monks. Using these sources, I highlight the creativity and productivity of Buddhist monastic lawmaking during the nineteenth century. A close analysis of monastic legal texts from this period also reveals key differences in the ways that monastic jurists understood and enacted legal pluralism when compared with colonial officials. Rather than treating the laws of the Buddha and the laws of the Crown as conflicting, as the British tended to do, monastic jurists purposefully aligned them. Rather than hardening legal boundaries between monastic and colonial regulation, monastic jurists pushed in the direction of integration, borrowing and exchange between local and imported laws.

This chapter explores the journey from principles to the practical implementation of sustainable development and subsequently the codified global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It begins by examining the foundational principles of international law that guide sustainable development efforts by reviewing in detail the history and motivation behind adopting a global set of goals to achieve holistic and measurable sustainable development by 2030. Then, the chapter focuses on the intersection between Indigenous peoples and the SDGs, acknowledging the historical disparities faced by these communities and how treaties have the potential to foster or frustrate the achievement of these goals. It then delves into guidelines for sustainable resource management and Indigenous development within the SDG framework, emphasizing inclusive approaches and participatory decision-making. By bridging principles with practical strategies, this chapter underscores the importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge, fostering partnerships, and implementing the SDGs to achieve sustainable development while respecting Indigenous rights and aspirations.

On December 6, 2023, the Indonesian Parliament passed Indonesia’s Criminal Code. The new Criminal Code replaces the Dutch-language colonial-era Penal Code and after fifty years of debate marks a milestone in Indonesian law. However, the new Code is controversial. It continues to criminalize interpersonal relations such as adultery and cohabitation. The framing of those offences is an accommodation of conflicting preferences among a wide range of domestic and international actors including those from the Islamic world, notably Saudi Arabia. This chapter examines the new Code as an arena of contestation, among inter-regional influences and between secular and religious actors seeking to shape Indonesian state law. It highlights three under-studied phenomena in Asia: inter-regional religious networks; their intersection with colonial legal legacies; and the migration of legal values, not only geographically or jurisdictionally, but also across internal domains within pluralist legal systems.

Between the 1570s and 1680s, England established more than two dozen overseas colonies and trading posts throughout the world. In mainland North America, the colonies included Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts and several other New England colonies, North and South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In the Caribbean and the North Atlantic, colonies were founded in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and Barbados, among several others, to which Jamaica was added by conquest in 1655. Various trading posts, or factories, were established—usually with the permission of the local populations—in Hudson’s Bay, India, Africa, and the East Indies. As a result of these activities, by the end of the seventeenth century, more than half a million English subjects, or about ten per cent of the nation’s population, lived across the seas.