Under colonial regimes, official recognition of legal pluralism helped Europeans exercise control over Asian populations.

Particularly when it came to personal or family laws, the colonial authorities often sanctioned different rules and norms for different population groups, rather than attempting to enforce uniform laws concerning marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the like.

In postcolonial regimes, on the other hand, states seeking to consolidate their power and instill a spirit of nationalism typically strove for uniformity across the entire civil law corpus rather than administer arguably unequal or discriminatory laws in patchwork fashion. Although Kunkler and Sezgin (2016:988) note that “the unification of legal systems became a major pillar of many postcolonial nation-building projects,” they go on to observe that this policy of legal uniformity gave way over time to a large-scale return to state- sponsored legal pluralism. “No fewer than 50 countries today recognize separate family laws for separate ethnic or religious groups of the population. This phenomenon ranges from countries that recognize only one group's religion-based family law (Indonesia) to countries that do so for multiple groups” (Kunkler and Sezgin 2016:988).

In this section, we present three studies of state-sponsored legal pluralism in contemporary Asian societies. They illustrate the tension between “modern” legal ideals of equality and uniformity on the one hand and deference to religious freedom and cultural autonomy on the other. Ironically, perhaps, it is often the case that the power of the state is actually strengthened when it abandons its effort to impose uniform laws on all population groups and permits pluri-legal systems to flourish. But doing so can sometimes mean the sacrifice of important normative principles or constitutional mandates that the state should in theory guarantee to all citizens.

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