Constitutional Politics in Southeast Asia (original) (raw)
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Constitutional Politics in Southeast Asia: From Contestation to Constitutionalism?
Contemporary Southeast Asia, 2014
over the last twenty-five years the constitutional landscape of Southeast Asia has changed tremendously. As in the rest of the world, states in the region are dramatically altering their constitutions, often putting in place institutional safeguards for individual rights, such as constitutional courts and human rights commissions. Yet despite the numerous formal changes, actual constitutional practice in the region has been highly uneven. Four areas are particularly contested: constitutional drafting and design; individual and religious rights; the role of the military in constitutional politics; and the rule of law, courts and justice. How states in Southeast Asia resolve unfolding conflicts in these four areas will be critical to how constitutionalism evolves in the region. replacing traditional legal scholarship with a new perspective on how constitutional politics are contested in the region, this article seeks to advance the scholarly debate by delving deeply into the dynamics that underpin unfolding constitutionalism trajectories and assessing whether countries in the region are actually deepening constitutional practice in a Western liberal sense or whether the model that seems to be emerging is quite different.
Journal of Comparative Law , 2019
This symposium sets out the law and practice of constitutional amendment in Southeast Asia. Contributions: 1. Jaclyn Neo & Bui Ngoc Son, Expanding the Universe of Comparative Constitutional Amendments in Southeast Asia. 2. Dian A.H. Shah, Post-Soeharto Constitutional Amendment in Indonesia: Promises and Pitfalls 3. Jaclyn Neo & Andrea Ong, Making the Singapore Constitution: Amendments as Constitution-Making 4. Ratana Taing, Constitutional Change and Amendment in Cambodia 5. HP Lee, Richard Foo, & Amber Tan, Constitutional Change in Malaysia 6. Dan Gatmaytan, Constitutional Change as Suspect Projects: The Philippines 7. Andrew Harding, Constitutional Amendment and Problems of Transition in Myanmar 8. Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang, Constitutional Amendment in Thailand: Amending in the Spectre of Parliamentary Dictatorship 9. Yaniv Roznai, Constitutional Amendability and Unamendability in South-East Asia 10. Rosalind Dixon, (Why) Comparative Constitutional Amendment in Southeast Asia
Journal of Comparative Law , 2019
This introductory article to our special section on Constitutional Amendment in Southeast Asia offers a justification and overview. We observe that while constitutional amendment has received significant attention recently, this rich scholarly enterprise has lacked a focus on Asian jurisdictions. Accordingly, our special section on Southeast Asian countries, which showcases constitutional amendment practices in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, seeks to fill a gap in the state of the scholarship. The lack of a voice on Asia in comparative constitutional law scholarship on amendments overlooks the contributions that these practices could offer to a more robust and perhaps more self-critical view of current scholarship. This is especially since formally amending the constitution has been the primary mode of constitutional change in many Southeast Asian countries.
Varieties of Constitutionalism in Asia
Asian Journal of Comparative Law, 2021
Western liberal constitutionalism, the dominant vision of which is rights-oriented and court centric is hegemonic to the discourse. While important, this is a particular rather than total expression of constitutionalism which conflates constitutionalism with liberalism and treat this as paradigmatic. This may obscure all other non-liberal models or fuel their dismissal as sham constitutions. A third space must be found, without collapsing anti-constitutionalist, illiberal despotism with no objective limits on power into the sphere of constitutionalism, and without equating judicial review with constitutionalism. To that end, this article seeks to advance the project of pluralising understandings of constitutionalism, drawing from the rich variety of constitutional experiments in Asia, with its multiplicity of religions, political ideologies government systems, cultures, and levels of economic development. Against an idealised model of liberal constitutionalism deployed as an organisational tool to highlight features of nonliberal constitutionalism in their full variety, the article examines three typologies of constitutionalism: religious, socialist and communitarian. In so doing, the idea of normatively desirable and defensible constitutionalist models is investigated, through an inquiry that goes beyond text and courts to other sites of constitutional practice and governance.
Constitutional Courts in New Democracies: Understanding Variation in East Asia
Global Jurist Advances, 2002
Recent literature on comparative judicial politics reveals a variety of roles that courts adopt in the process of democratization. These include, very rarely, serving as a trigger for democratization, and more commonly, serving as downstream guarantor for departing autocrats or as downstream consolidator of democracy. In light of these roles, this essay reviews six relatively recent books:
Competing Visions of the Rule of Law in Southeast Asia: Power, Rhetoric and Governance
Asian Studies Review, 2018
This article introduces a special issue on the emergent relationship between the rhetoric and implementation of the rule of law concept in Southeast Asia. It thematically introduces four country case studies (Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam), and the case of ASEAN’s adoption of the rule of law in region-building, which are included in this special issue. We highlight how ideals that are arguably central to the “tradition” of the rule of law are being excised, marginalised, defended and/or undermined in Southeast Asian contexts. We emphasise how the very concept is deeply contested and far from neutral – at stake is the very notion of “law” for whom, and for what. The article offers insight into the social dynamics affecting how the rule of law is being interpreted by political actors and how it is being contested and consolidated via governance practices in the region, and proposes new avenues for research in assessing how the rule of law is operating in transitional and authoritarian state settings.