Featured in The Palgrave Handbook of Political Norm Dynamics in Southeast Asia (Palgrave Macmillan) forthcoming 2023
How does the re-configuration of political norms animating rule of law in Singapore and Hong Kong normalize authoritarianism? Informed by Foucault’s interrogations of the compound, overlapping meanings and processes of ‘norm’, this chapter addresses this question. It traces the socio-legal power of normalizing cultural scripts to argue that in Singapore and Hong Kong, the normalization of authoritarianism is marked by a tension between domestic and transnational legal discourses. In authoritarian states, the rule of law is made to serve the consolidation of the state’s power over territories, discourses, and populations. However, borders are porous when it comes to rule-of-law discourses, requiring authoritarian states to engage in perpetual projects of normalizing authoritarian rule of law so as to manage contestation.