Suchergebnisse

AbstractLex mercatoria (the law of merchants) has a mythical legal status, which, whether true or not, influences legal thinking to this day. It harks back to a time of Venetian traders and a complex amalgam of European principalities that, it was believed, required merchants to establish their own private "law"' to facilitate commerce that applied within and beyond borders. In recent years, legal scholars and practitioners are reimagining lex mercatoria in order to facilitate globalization. This special section will consider how these discussions and activities are transforming the nature of the "translocal" (places where the global is made local). We want to understand how these political, economic, social, and technological transformations have affected and continue to affect traders, corporations, and lawyers engaged in transnational, and transsystemic, legal interactions. The special section will examine these issues primarily from historical perspectives, but this essay will also interrogate the contemporary status and reimagined notion of this idea.

This article demonstrates how an integral element of the fabric
of governance on the eastern Indonesian island of Lombok, and many
other parts of the Indonesian archipelago, are non-state local security
arrangements, such as night watches and militias. These groups play a
significant role in the local infrastructure of security and law enforcement.
Consequently, this article challenges a common assumption by
legal scholars, and many other observers of Indonesia, that state-based
institutions such as the police are the exclusive, and only legitimate, mode
of law enforcement in Indonesia. Through an ethnographic engagement
with the idea of law enforcement on Lombok, I seek to broaden these
assumptions about legitimate modes of statecraft. These non-state entities
fill a void in the Indonesian law enforcement architecture that the state
is unable or unwilling to fulfil (or potentially finds it more practical to
delegate to local non-state institutions).

Indonesia's democratic reform and decentralization after the fall of authoritarian President Soeharto has brought both painful transformations and the potential of new beginnings. This is also the case for the island of Lombok where political changes have affected not only obvious political players, but also local Muslim religious leaders (Tuan Guru). These religious leaders wield a high level of socio-political and religious authority. Their significant social standing is largely due to the central role of Islam across Lombok which not only relates to people's spiritual lives, but is also identified in long established local forms of governance that are focused upon Tuan Guru and their organizations. This article will seek to understand how to delineate their religious authority and conceptualize its application in these fast changing circumstances. In doing so I argue that the complex and unstable times that have occurred alongside the transition to democracy are transforming the potent authority of Tuan Guru.

At a time of 'interdisciplinary' scholarly debate and 'transdisciplinary'
pedagogy, some disciplines appear more siloed and tone deaf to each
other than ever before. This article will consider why law and anthropology
as disciplines offer almost no impact upon each other's educational
or research agendas.

Seeking to expand the domain of the political beyond normative understandings of the state, the articles in this special edition examine the performative aspects of governance and state-making in Southeast Asia. Combining historical and contemporary case studies, this collection brings together four examples of performative statecraft from Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia. The collection coheres around the analytical optic of performance, with particular emphasis on the performative repertoires developed by religious militas and non-state security groups. This analytical optic allows the contributors to gauge how such non-state groups conceive and engage with the state and its institutions, and to provide fresh insights on the performative aspects of state-making processes.