This chapter uses two narratives of legalities to capture distinctive profiles of juristocratic reckoning. The first narrative centers on a legality brimming with connotative power. Instead of relying on the direct, instrumental power of human rights, a group of Burmese activists draws upon the capacity of rights to change the way they feel about themselves and generate the momentum to inspire, encourage, and rally others to take up collective political action. Although their country has once more descended into widespread insurrections, some of these activists still carry hope for human rights as they fight back or flee into exile again. The second account is about “governing through contagion,” a legality afflicting state centralization over strategies of control of infectious diseases. The Singaporean state’s strategies to regulate contagion grew out of earlier epidemics and global circulations of capital, violence, and ideas and mutated according to the entanglements of relationships among humans, animals, microorganisms, and technologies. As humans comply with, resist, or otherwise interact with strategies of control, these relationships produce “inter/dysconnectedness” that expose, perhaps exacerbate, existing injustices. Although the two narratives reflect divergent experiences with law, both illustrate a nonlinear worldview, one in which human societies, law, legalities, and thus juristocratic reckonings develop cyclically and chronologically. In one narrative this chapter offers three coexisting perspectives on juristocratic reckoning that transcend the editors’ suggestions; in the other account it shows that a more expansive chronology and cast of actors can shape the way we understand moments of law as juristocratic reckoning. What we make of a moment of law depends on where we look for legalities, where we situate it, and how we appreciate their highs and lows.

This chapter provides an outline analysis of the evolving governance framework for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the island city-state of Singapore. In broad terms, Singapore’s signature approach to AI Governance reflects its governance culture more broadly, which harnesses the productive energy of free-market capitalism contained within clear guardrails, as well as the dual nature (as a regulator and development authority) of Singapore’s lead public agency in AI policy formulation. Singapore’s approach is interesting for other jurisdictions in the region and around the world and it can already be observed to have influenced the recent Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Guide on AI Governance and Ethics which was promulgated in early 2024.

The Singapore Government is well known for its stout defence of the use of capital punishment in the face of international criticism. It recently released studies to support claims of its effective deterrence against drug offending. However, domestic support for the death penalty, evidence for its effectiveness in controlling drug offences, and case law on capital drug offences are more nuanced than what appears at first sight. This chapter examines recent social, political, judicial, and regional developments, which may shape Singapore’s future death penalty policy and practice for drug offences.

Chapter 6 focuses on the British Straits Settlements and the Malay States. At the edge of the imperial frontier, where Chinese organizations and their attendant customs had long held sway, British laws and institutions struggled to gain a foothold. From its precarious state in the early 1870s, in the course of a few decades, Britain’s toehold on the Malay Peninsula would solidify in the Straits Settlements and extend to encompass the Malay States. The rapid extension of state control over labor transformed one of the empire’s most strategically vital cities and some of its most inaccessible and unruly territory from, or so British officials would claim, locales of lawless immorality to models of civilized behavior, orderly governance, and stable prosperity. As the overseer-state struggled to establish its political supremacy against highly resilient cultural and economic systems established previously by the Chinese Secret Societies and kongsi, its success or failure hinged increasingly on its ontological power to define moral governance and just rule. In this sense, British colonial authority in the Straits Settlements was synonymous with regulation of the Chinese workforce.

This chapter provides a practitioner’s point of view on diplomatic images. The author is positioned to give a unique perspective as a freelance photographer who is currently based in Singapore, which has recently become a significant city-state for major global diplomatic events. Through his first-hand experiences of covering high-profile international diplomatic events, such as the 2018 Trump-Kim Summit held in Singapore, the author takes us backstage and demonstrates how famous diplomatic images are produced to represent the affective register of the moment. In so doing, the chapter illuminates the situational context of the photographer in taking diplomatic images, offering insight into the editorial process in which diplomatic images are produced by the media.

This chapter provides a history of sweatshops during the industrial revolution in the United States and Great Britain and explains how higher wages and better conditions were eventually attained. It then looks at the postwar East Asian economies that had sweatshops and that developed more rapidly than Great Britain and the United States did. Finally, the chapter looks at how economic development has taken place over the last two decades in countries that had sweatshops identified in the first edition of this book and how sweatshop wages have improved.

In this chapter, language policies are examined with reference to how they are debated in public discourse. The chapter argues that, like in politics, the space afforded to language policy in conventional media is often narrow, and depends upon how language-related issues invoke broader narratives of identity and ideology, though more significant debating often occurs in new media. The case study examines debates about language policy in Singapore, drawing on examples from traditional media (in the form of letters to the editor) to comments under a Facebook post by a local media outlet.

English Medium Instruction (EMI) researchers have called for studies that extend our understanding of EMI classroom discourse and the role of language in EMI in general (Dalton-Puffer & Smit, 2013; McKinley & Rose, 2022; Macaro, 2019). Corpus-based analytical frameworks are well-suited to analyze large amounts of naturally occurring language data and thus to provide reliable and verifiable findings about situationally defined language use such as language use in EMI contexts (see also Chapter 9, Author, this volume).

The primary goal of this chapter is to introduce the principles and practices of carrying out an additive multi-dimensional (MD) analysis (Biber, 1988; Berber Sardina et al., 2019) affording an empirically driven comprehensive linguistic analysis of variation in a register that could be applied to an EMI context. Our case study showcases the methodology using 500,000 words of text from the Singapore EMI corpus (SEMIC). Relying on the results of the MD analysis, this chapter also demonstrates how to identify text types via cluster analysis, which could provide additional information about classroom discourse. It will demonstrate show how these advanced quantitative analytical frameworks can be applied to analyze EMI classroom discourse. The chapter will also highlight practical aspects of MD analysis.

Indonesia has long been the country of origin for millions of migrant workers. Indonesian men and women have left their homes in search of work to provide a better life for themselves and their families. Most migrant workers are in semi-skilled or unskilled positions in fields such as agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and domestic work, which are mostly low-wage and difficult jobs. There are large numbers of Indonesians in Asia, such as in Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and in wealthy countries in the Persian Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Migrant workers leave Indonesia both through official, legal channels, as well as through illegal, unofficial channels. These workers are often referred to as “irregular” migrants. Migrants are often treated poorly and are found in dangerous, undesirable jobs. The Indonesian government is increasingly compelled to try and address abuses of their citizens. The Indonesian government is highly attuned to the treatment of its citizens abroad and has embarked on many measures to try and improve their safety overseas. Ultimately, the government has seen some successes at protecting compatriots, but continues to face significant challenges in doing so for a larger number of their workers overseas.

The rise of The Port and the Mo clan coincided with the “Chinese century” in maritime East Asia and the peak of the Qing dynasty’s power. Their story also demonstrates a world whose core areas were not only at rough parity but also converging with both ends of Eurasia meeting, trading, and learning from each other in Southeast Asia. At the same time, this period implanted the seeds for an eventual divergence. European mercantile organizations and, later, states came to dominate the sea-lanes and control the flow of silver and finance. They were able to shape and set the rules for an emerging new order. Chinese merchants and immigrants eventually lost their military and political agency and were absorbed into the expanding European empires. Meanwhile, more firmly bounded states and nativist sentiments emerged in mainland Southeast Asia. Both factors deprived The Port of relatively unhindered access to the maritime trade routes and translocal networks. Nonetheless, the Mo continued to enjoy significant autonomy until the French colonization of the water world in 1867, taking advantage of the hazy and ill-defined borders in the water world.

This chapter revisits the efforts mostly spearheaded by ASEAN to bring the Third Indochina War to an end. As ASEAN is the sum of its parts, the chapter describes the perspectives of the various ASEAN member states as well as how they arrived at a collective decision.

This chapter explores Australia’s engagement with South-East Asia during the period under review by focusing on its partnership with Singapore. In the period under review, what former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull termed a ‘natural’ partnership showed signs of becoming an increasingly important conduit for Canberra’s engagement with the region, hitherto an under-realised one. With Australia looking to deepen its ties with South-East Asia and ASEAN more broadly, Canberra’s partnership with Singapore went some way towards realising this goal.

There is an extensive literature devoted to analysing the common features of the Four Dragons – Singapore, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is generally acknowledged that all emerged under authoritarian tutelage, although all are now experiencing pressures for democratisation; all prospered in a regional economic and security order underwritten by the United States, although one in which increasingly the United States is being displaced by Japan; all were the beneficiaries (although to an uneven degree and with uneven results) of a Confucian social inheritance. The approach taken by Australian policy makers to the Dragons is to a great extent a consequence of their rapid rise as major economic entities in the Western Pacific within the United States-dominated Pacific economy and security complex. Relations with the Dragons are relations with what, for Australians, is the vibrant Asia of rapid economic modernisation, as opposed to the timeless Asia of subsistence agriculture. The fact that these systems have ascended so rapidly is a particular test of each country’s capacity to engage with the region, given their relative lack of significance before the later 1980s.

This chapter considers how Confucian values constitute constitutional identity in three Confucian-influenced countries in Asia: China, South Korea, and Singapore. Drawing on Professor Gary Jacobsohn’s framework for the comparative study of constitutional identity, this contribution argues that Confucian commitments are embodied in the formal and/or prescriptive constitutions in the three Asian jurisdictions. The constitutions’ Confucian heritages are continuously dynamic. Disharmony provokes a change in Confucian constitutional identity. The change involves not only judicial but also social and political activities.