Editors: Abel Polese (Dublin City University), Danny Marks (Dublin City University), Elio Della Monica (Dublin City University)

We are preparing a special issue of Advances in Southeast Asian Studies (ASEAS), open access, scopus indexed and published by the University of Vienna. The special issue is planned for March 2028.

We already have a variety of papers but we would welcome 1-2 additional submissions to complement the collection. We are especially interested in case studies of countries that are not yet covered, including Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Brunei, though a paper offering a unique perspective on any other Southeast Asian country or a comparative study with other regions (i.e. Fiji, Solomon) will also be considered.

If you are interested, please send a short abstract (300 words) by 15 June 2026 (the earlier the better) 

to Elio De Monica elio.dellamonica2@mail.dcu.ie

cc to abel.polese@dcu.ie and danny.marks@dcu.ie

Rationale for the call for papers is below. Please check the journal and its scope to align your abstract if interested: https://aseas.univie.ac.at/index.php/aseas

Objectives and Scope:

This special issue explores informality in Southeast Asia as a complex, pervasive social and political phenomenon that transcends the limited scope of mere economic survival or criminal activity. We challenge the conventional, often pejorative, understanding of informality as a pathology or a transitional stage, instead viewing it as an enduring, autonomous, or even alternative form of governance, reflecting a continuous spectrum of practices from the unrecorded to the illicit.

Southeast Asia is a particularly valuable region for examining these questions. With between 75-90 percent of the workforce in many countries operating outside the formal sector (ILO 2023), the region has some of the world's highest rates of informal employment, Further, it is home to a wide range of state formations, varying from competitive democracies and single-party systems to military-governed states and hybrid regimes (Slater 2010). This diversity is important because the relationship between the state and informal practices differs throughout the region. Scholars have shown that state-citizen relations in the region are frequently mediated through patronage networks, personal ties, and clientelistic exchange (Scott 1972; Hutchcroft 1998; Kerkvliet 2009). These relations enable social structures in these societies to often bypass the formal state. Southeast Asia's rapid and deeply uneven urbanisation further deepens informality. Almost all the region’s major cities have expanded faster than formal governance can keep pace with, leading to informal arrangements for housing, mobility, labour, and services becoming embedded in the region’s urbanisation (Bunnell and Harris 2012). Existing scholarship have contributed to understanding informality in the region but tends to view it primarily as an economic or survival phenomenon, while ignoring the underlying moral and political dimensions which also drive it. This special issue therefore helps to address this gap.

The primary objective is to develop a more nuanced framework for informality by focusing on the divergence between individual and state moralities that informal practices reveal. By examining how actors articulate justifications and social mores—their "moral frame"—for engaging in practices that bypass the state (Polese 2023), we shift attention from the state's legal perspective to the infrapolitics (Scott 2012) or the hidden, low-profile resistance and accommodation through which ordinary actors navigate power. We therefore shift attention from formal legal categories to the moral frameworks actors use to justify their own conduct. Rather than determining the legality of a practice, we examine the ways in which actors themselves understand what they do and what those understandings illustrate about the relationship between state authority, social norms, and lived governance.

The articles in this special issue examine how informal practices illuminate the implicit and explicit relationships between state, society, morality, and governance. Across cases spanning urban mobility, housing, labour migration, waste recycling, informal finance, everyday security, and infrastructure, they reinterpret informal and illegal dynamics not merely as survival strategies but as alternative, negotiated, or subversive forms of governance (Polese, Russo, and Strazzari 2019). They also analyse how actor positionality shapes movement along the governance continuum, including who can act informally, with what legitimacy, and at what risk. By moving beyond simplistic legal–illegal or moral–immoral binaries, this special issue contributes to ongoing debates in political science, anthropology, sociology, and urban studies. It also generates empirically grounded insights relevant to policy and decision-makers grappling with the governance of informality and the management of vulnerable populations in the region.

References:

Bunnell, Tim and Andrew Harris. 2012. "Re-viewing Informality: Perspectives from Urban Asia." International Development Planning Review 34, no. 4: 339–348.

Hutchcroft, Paul D. 1998. Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

ILO. 2023. Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Update. Geneva: International Labour Organisation.

Kerkvliet, Benedict J. Tria. 2009. "Everyday Politics in Peasant Societies (and Ours)." Journal of Peasant Studies 36, no. 1: 227–243.

Polese, Abel. "What is informality?(mapping)“the art of bypassing the state” in Eurasian spaces-and beyond." Eurasian Geography and Economics 64, no. 3 (2023): 322-364.

Polese, Abel, Alessandra Russo, and Francesco Strazzari, eds. Governance beyond the law: The immoral, the illegal, the criminal. Springer, 2019.

Scott, James C. "Infrapolitics and mobilizations: A response by James C. Scott." Revue française d’études américaines 131, no. 1 (2012): 112-117.

Scott, James C. 1972. "Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia." American Political Science Review 66, no. 1: 91–113.

Slater, Dan. 2010. Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.