South and Southeast Asia Research
Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ) is an interdisciplinary institute primarily concerned with studying the project to promote the rights of women and children in Thailand. It involved academics from the University’s Institute of Criminology and Centre of Development Studies.
The study has outlined the international and regional frameworks of rights; the intersection between access to justice and other socioeconomic, political and cultural rights; and the challenges of legal pluralism. It then went on to introduce the different barriers faced by women in their attempts to use the state, religious or customary justice systems.
The result of this crucial work was a major report titled ‘Womens’ Access to Justice: Perspectives from the ASEAN region’ on gender inclusion published in 2015, that became the springboard for a collaborative engagement with the TIJ to build a network of gender scholars to undertake comparative research across East, South East and South Asia on the subject of Gender Justice.
Policy work
This earlier engagement in the region was the forerunner to a larger policy engagement, which has seen Fellow of Jesus College, Professor Shailaja Fennell, win an international bid, through Cambridge Enterprise, to lead over fifty international scholars in the writing of the first ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Development Report on Inclusion and Sustainability, which will be launched in the spring of 2021.
The network developed with the TIJ supported network also resulted in furthering new research collaborations in the region, contributing to concepts that framed the following academic work that has been recently published:
Fennell, S. (2020) Women, Law and Collective Action : Examining negotiations to claim gender rights in China and India, in Anand, P. B., S. Fennell and F. Comim (eds.) The Handbook of BRICS and Emerging Economies, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Fennell, S. with M. Tanwir, Not Accepting Abuse as the Norm: local forms of institutional reform to improve reporting on domestic violence in Punjab, Journal of International Women's Studies, vol.2, issue 7. August 2019.
Contact us
If you would like to learn more about the research currently being undertaken in Southeast Asia, please contact its lead, Professor Shailaja Fennell.
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