Researching State and Personhood: Law & Society in Southeast Asia is the first conference to follow the December 2012 workshop, Socio-legal Research on Southeast Asia: Themes, Directions, and Challenge, organized by Lynette J. Chua and Andrew Harding at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies. As the first in a series of academic gatherings planned to advance socio-legal research on Southeast Asia, the December 2012 workshop brought together leading scholars in the field and researchers from the region. Its goals were to foster an academic community and articulate potential research directions for socio-legal studies on Southeast Asia.

During the December 2012 workshop, participants proposed several research themes that should be further explored in the region. Among them was the theme of legal consciousness. Emphasizing human agency and socially constructed processes, studies on legal consciousness can shed light on Southeast Asia’s complicated plurality. Hence, Lynette and Andrew, together with David Engel (a participant of the December 2012 workshop) decided to organize this conference and solicit papers that draw on original fieldwork to interrogate the relationship between the state and social actors, particularly the ways in which individuals or local communities experience, resist, or otherwise navigate state law, and examine the concept of the state in relation to other forms of social ordering in Southeast Asia.

In line with the interdisciplinary nature of socio-legal studies, this conference is also premised on the assumptions that state and personhood in Southeast Asia can be fruitfully investigated by drawing on the broad interdisciplinary perspectives of the law and society field and that “law is too important to be left to the lawyers.” Many scholars write about issues related to state and personhood in Southeast Asia, but they often do so within the boundaries of their disciplines and may not focus on or recognize the important legal implications of their studies. Lynette, Andrew, and David hope that this conference can begin building bridges across disciplinary divides and bring together scholars who come from diverse academic fields and whose research focus on different aspects or locations within Southeast Asia.