Regulating globalization in South & Southeast Asia
Years active: 2017-2020
CAPI's "Regulating Globalization in South and Southeast Asia" project has brought new faces and partnerships to campus and facilitated unique overseas experiences for UVic scholars, including formalization of ties with Bhutan's first law school (above).
Through the Canadian Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Advanced Scholars (QES-AS) Scholarships program, CAPI and the UVic Faculty of Law and their partners in South and Southeast Asia are participating in activating a dynamic community of young global leaders around the world to conduct interdisciplinary research on innovative governance and justice strategies to mitigate the harsher effects of economic globalization in South and Southeast Asia (specifically Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Thailand, and Vietnam).
The QES-AS program will bring thirteen advanced scholars whose work focuses on South and Southeast Asia to the University of Victoria to create lasting impacts both at home and abroad through cross-cultural exchanges encompassing international education, discovery and inquiry, and professional experiences. It will also send five Canadian post-doctorate early career scholars to the region to develop valuable experience and build skills and networks in Canada and South and Southeast Asia.
Objectives of the QES-AS program include:
Developing global citizens through enriched academic, professional, and cross-cultural experiences
Activating a new generation of enterprising leaders in Canada and around the world through facilitating lasting local and global community engagement
Enhancing collaborative capacity and deepen peer relationships among Queen Elizabeth Scholars to enrich the program experience and facilitate personal and professional growth
Nima Dorji is a PhD student at the Law and Society Program at the University of Victoria and a Canadian Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Advanced Scholar (QES-AS). He is a senior lecturer and one of the founding faculty members at the Jigme Singye Wangchuck (JSW) School of Law, Bhutan’s first law school. Nima has been working on the law school project since 2014, which led to its opening on July 3, 2017, as the law school welcomed its first cohort of 25 students to the campus. Before joining JSW, Nima worked as a Legal Officer at Bhutan National Legal Institute (BNLI). He was one of the founding staff members of BNLI, managing UN-funded activities and legal dissemination programs. He received his BA and LLB (Hons.) degrees from NALSAR University of Law in India in 2009, his Postgraduate Diploma in National Law (PGDNL) from the Royal Institute of Management, Bhutan, in 2010, and his Master of Laws (LLM) from the University of Canberra, Australia, in 2014.
Ratana Ly is a PhD candidate in the UVic Faculty of Law. She completed her LLB at the Royal University of Law and Economics, Cambodia, and LLM at the Nagoya University, Japan. She then worked as a researcher at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law in Cambodia, focusing her research on international human rights, international criminal law, labor migration, and refugees. Observing the recent booming of construction in Cambodia, she is keen to explore the relationship between this business sector with labor rights, migration, gender, and the environment. In her spare time, she enjoys taking long walks. Ratana is looking forward to the exciting challenges and opportunities, which will come her way during the program, and learn as she goes. Ratana is particularly grateful to CAPI, the QES-AS scholarship, and UVic for the funding and other support, which allow her to undertake these studies.
Songkrant is a PhD student at the Law and Society Program at the University of Victoria and a Canadian Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Advanced Scholar (QES-AS). Songkrant was an environmental lawyer who practiced law in Thailand for ten years and then shifted to teach law at Chiang Mai University, Thailand, since 2016. His worked was about empowering local people to protect their environment, natural resources, and their health and also encouraging young lawyers to engage in public interest lawyering, especially in environmental field. He is interested in the interaction between formal legal institutions, such as legal texts, judiciary, and informal institutions such as local communities, public interest lawyers, academy that leads to create law in action, in order to find the best way to expand civil liberties and civil rights. His tentative thesis title is “Creating Rights from the Bottom: The Case of Environmental Public Interest Lawyers in Thailand”. This work will investigate the roles and impacts of public interest lawyers in developing environmental rights in the context of developing country like Thailand.
Pema Wangdi is a PhD student at the Law and Society Program at UVic and a Canadian Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Advanced Scholar (QES-AS). He is a senior lecturer and one of the founding faculty members at the Jigme Singye Wangchuck (JSW) School of Law, Bhutan’s first law school.
Pema has been working on the law school project since 2011, which led to its opening on July 3, 2017, when the law school welcomed its first cohort of 25 students to the campus. He has designed and taught the philosophy course for the law students and also co-designed and taught the Political Science Course. He is also part of the committee who is designing the Gross National Happiness and the Law Course, which is considered to be the capstone of the JSW School of Law Curriculum.
Prior to this current job, Pema worked as a Managing Director of a Radio Station popularly known in Thimphu, Bhutan as Kuzoo FM, the Voice of the Youth. He has also worked as a curriculum writer and audio/visual producer for the Ministry of Education. Apart from that he has an experience of teaching from Kindergarten to the University level. He received his teaching training from Samtse College of Education, Bhutan and studied Cinema, TV, Stage and Radio from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Alberta. He received his BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Rangsit University, Thailand and MA in Philosophy from Fordham University, NY USA.
Dr. Porananond (PhD, University of Glasgow) is the Director of the Center of ASEAN Transnational Studies at the Faculty of Law, Chiang Mai University. Her research interest is comparative competition law and the enactment and enforcement of competition laws in Southeast Asia and within new jurisdictions. Her book, Competition Law in the ASEAN Countries: Regional Law and National Systems (Wolters Kluwer) was published in 2018. During her stay at UVic, Dr. Porananond will be working on her current project exploring globalization of the goals of competition law, which looks into the interaction between the economic oriented goal of competition law advocated by matured competition law jurisdictions and more socially and politically inclusive ones adopted by younger jurisdictions.
Kitpatchara Somanawat is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Law at Chiang Mai University, Thailand, specializing in legal history, legal philosophy, social theory and constitutionalism. During his UVic stay, he will be using primarily historical methods to compare the traits of First Nations and Thai judges.
Vandanet Hing is a researcher and lecturer at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law at the Royal University of Law and Economics in Cambodia whose time at CAPI included conducting research on "the development of international criminal law: assessing Extraordinary Chamber in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC) precedents" as part of the CAPI/University of Victoria Faculty of Law project "Regulating Globalization in South and Southeast Asia."
Dr. Ly Anh Hoàng is a Lecturer in International Law and Acting Head of the Department of Research Management and Journal Administration at Hanoi Law University. Dr. Hoàng will be at UVic for three months working on her current research project investigating Vietnam's compliance with the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and undertaking a research placement with UVic's Environmental Law Centre.
Sunayana Ganguly is currently Assistant Professor at the Azim Premji University in Bangalore. She received her PhD in Political Science from the Freie Universität Berlin where she was affiliated with the Environmental Policy Research Centre, while working with the German Development Institute in Bonn. She was also previously, a research associate at the Industrial Ecology Group, University of Lausanne (Switzerland), working on the interdisciplinary research project on the dynamics of consumption patterns, practices and policies among new consumers in two megacities of South and South-East Asia. Her first book Deliberating Environment Policy in India - Participation and the role of advocacy was published in 2015 (Routledge). Her time at CAPI will be spent exploring themes on environmental governance, civil society and sustainable consumption with a focus on South Asia.
Sushmita is currently teaching at the School of Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University, Bangalore as Assistant Professor. She finished her doctoral degree from Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her work falls in the larger domain of urban politics but she draws from methods and debates across disciplines like anthropology, political economy, history and law. At CAPI she worked on her book manuscript which looks at the processes and politics of villages getting drawn into the urban fold in the context of Delhi since 1950s to contemporary times.
Thanh Phan is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Victoria, Canada (UVic). His research is co-funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Canadian Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Advanced Scholars. He is also teaching Engineering Law at UVic. Thanh Phan worked for the Vietnam Competition Agency (VCA) for ten years as an expert in competition law enforcement, after two years at the Ministry of Justice of Vietnam. Thanh also served as a member of the Vietnamese delegation negotiating Vietnam-EU and Vietnam-Customs Union free trade agreements. He has published journal articles in the Canadian Journal of Law and Technology, Houston Journal of International Law, Louisiana Law Review, and American Bar Association’s International Antitrust Bulletin, among others. Thanh was educated at Hanoi Law University, Nagoya University, and the University of Victoria.
Currently, he is a member of the Software Engineering Global Interaction Lab at UVic, conducting research on global governance in cyberspace. His studies focus on three topics: national jurisdiction in cyberspace, the legal aspects of smart cities, and legal obligations of platform owners in peer-to-peer markets. He is also helping edit a book titled Smart Cities in Asia: Governance and Innovation.
Dr. Pooja Parmar is an Assistant Professor at University of Victoria Faculty of Law. Her current teaching and research focus on the legal profession, lawyers’ ethics, legal history, Indigeneity, property, and international human rights law. Her book Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.
During her time in Bhutan, Pooja will engage in collaborative research on property law and assist with the Bar Council of Bhutan.
Supriya Routh is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, where he teaches Contracts, Individual Employment Relationship Law, and the Legal Process. His research interests include theoretical conceptualizations of work and labour law, workers’ organization initiatives, international labour law, atypical and informal workers in the global South, and human rights and human development.
He plans to examine how a combined public/private collaborative approach to overcoming multidimensional deprivation of human development of women informal workers could be successfully realized through creative collective action devised by such marginalized women workers. Academic and policy studies often prioritize the role of state institutions in promoting women informal workers’ aspirations. Although, increasingly scholars in sociology and political economy (e.g., Elizabeth Hill, Rina Agarwala, Martha Chen) are adopting a broader approach than a state-centric one, the existing legal literature largely ignores the role of non-state entities (including workers’ autonomous initiatives) alongside the state institutions in improving workers’ lives. Following this scholarship, he is interested in ascertaining how marginalized women innovatively overcome the challenges posed by neoliberalism to the labour movement by simultaneously making use of state and non-state institutions of democratic societies.
