The Conclusion summarizes and discusses the book’s three main contributions to the law and society literature. These contributions include providing a new perspective into the paradoxical effects of law on daily survival, bringing the notion of precarity into a sharper focus in studies of disadvantaged and marginalized citizens, and providing a critical view of law in regimes governed by authoritarian or dictatorial rule. The Conclusion suggests that people’s struggles against precarity and the aftereffects of their behavior are shaped by the following factors: The (mis)match between law and other sets of values and understandings of justice, legal ambiguity and the prevalence of informal processes and practices, and the regulatory and normative role of the state. The book ends with a critical review of the literature on legal precarity, and a discussion of the benefits that the sociolegal perspective will offer to the broader research agenda on global precarity.

The Introduction sets out the core puzzle of the book, its central question and argument, and the research setting. It begins with a brief story about a Vietnamese female worker’s struggle to make ends meet, and her attempt to withdraw her pension early to meet pressing family demands. The anecdote raises a striking issue about the paradoxical nature of citizens’ use of the law, or resistance to it, in their daily life: While their behaviour represents an attempt to overcome certain conditions of uncertainty and instability in work and life, their action ironically puts them in another challenging, precarious situation. This chapter introduces the notion of precarity and outlines key elements of the conceptual framework that shed light on the mutual relationship between precarity and law as developed from the author's ethnographic observations of Vietnamese low-income workers and residents.

This chapter critically engages with relevant legal consciousness literature and develops the conceptual framework of the book. It examines three accounts of law in everyday life – hegemony, alienation, and empowerment – and demonstrates their limitations in explaining the mixed, paradoxical effects of law observed through the experiences of interviewed workers and residents in Vietnam. The ethnographic approach adopted in this research foregrounds the complex nature of individuals’ life circumstances and their decision-making. The concept of precarity as applied in this book consists of three main components: Precarity as a phenomenon and result of the broader neoliberal economic structure, precarity as multifaceted and variegated individual experiences, and precarity as a ground of resistance. This chapter develops a three-pronged process that underpins the mutually reinforcing relationship between precarity and law, and identifies some of the factors that make a socialist country like Vietnam a suitable setting to explore such a relationship.

This chapter explores the decisions of low-income factory workers employed in light manufacturing industries in relation to their social insurance benefits. It discusses why many factory workers have chosen to withdraw their social insurance money early rather than accumulating the social insurance benefits to receive a pension in their retirement. The chapter shows that, as workers experience unstable work and subsist on low incomes, they have come up with tactics that exploit the law to fulfil their daily needs. These tactics allow the workers to withdraw their social insurance early in a way that complies with the letter of the law but actually undermines law's objective and authority. The justifications for their actions reveal their struggle with family needs and financial hardship, and their moral obligations to family members. This chapter analyzes the complex and multifaceted nature of workers’ legal consciousness as they face a trade-off between their needs and their legal rights.

This chapter covers issues of land and housing in peri-urban areas, which have experienced fast-paced industrial and infrastructure development. It examines the precariousness of urban dwellers, most of whom are migrants from other provinces to the city, who seek to build their own house to settle down and achieve a sense of stability in the city. There is an ongoing tension between these people’s sense of autonomy and their right to housing, and their sense of economic and political disadvantage in the land and housing markets, which are fraught with brokerage and corruption. The chapter investigates how these people engage in illegal construction activities, by building their houses on cheap, low-priced agricultural land that is not legally designated for residential purposes, to achieve stability. Yet as a result of their actions, these urban dwellers became trapped in precarious situations. Their settlement was subject to surveillance by the local authority and some people even lost their houses following government measures to crackdown on illegal construction.

This chapter provides important background on legal reform and social change in Vietnam since the economic reform of đổi mới. It examines various accounts of the role of law in shaping state and society relationships in Vietnam, covering issues such as constitutional amendments, economic governance, dispute resolution, and rights mobilization. It also draws upon some important and useful insights relating to the operations of law in daily life from the anthropology literature. It can be seen from existing literature that law has had a limited role and legitimacy in the regulation of social life, which is predominantly shaped by informal practices and morality.

With the exception of India and Pakistan, South Asian countries have yet to properly implement their competition laws and policies. This chapter explores ways in which the implementation gap may be bridged, focusing on factors which may motivate governments or competition authorities in these countries to engage more meaningfully with competition enforcement and also considering strategies for doing so. The chapter argues that governments and competition authorities are more likely to support competition enforcement in their contexts if they are convinced of its potential to help them realise their goals of economic and social developmental goals. It also observes these countries’ growing engagement in the digital economy for its potential for growth and development and explores the role of competition enforcement for regulating e-commerce platforms. Finally, the chapter considers how the South Asian countries may learn from each other, and strategies for competition enforcement.

India and Pakistan adopted modern competition legislations in 2002 and 2007 respectively. This chapter traces and compares the adoption of modern competition legislations in the two countries to understand how these shaped the schemes and ambits of these legislations as well as the extent of their compatibility with and legitimacy in their respective countries. The chapter appraises the pre-conditions of transfer in India and Pakistan focusing particularly on their legal and political institutional landscapes and evaluates their respective motivations for adopting modern competition legislations. It also identifies the transfer mechanisms and the nature and range of legal and political institutions engaged by these countries in the course of adoption, and examines how the interplay of these institutions impacts the compatibility, legitimacy, and content of the adopted legislations.

The extent to which a country succeeds in enforcing its competition legislation is dependent as much on the interaction between the adopted competition system and the pre-existing legal system of the country as it is on the performance of the competition authority established by the adopted legislation. This chapter examines the extent and nature of interactions between the adopted competition enforcement systems and pre-existing legal systems in India and Pakistan by evaluating the petitions filed from orders of the CCI and CCP before the general courts in their countries. The chapter demonstrates that the nature and quality of these interactions has a discernible impact on competition enforcement in these countries. It argues that the interactions between the Indian and Pakistani competition legislations and the pre-existing legal systems in India and Pakistan are largely shaped in part by the strategies, mechanisms, and institutions through which the countries had initially adopted their respective competition legislation and the compatibility and legitimacy generated in the process. It further argues that the nature of these interactions determines the extent of competition enforcement in the country and the pace at which the adopted legislation integrates with the country’s pre-existing legal system.

South Asian countries, i.e., Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, are not only at similar stages of economic development and have comparable relationships with multi-lateral agencies, but are also connected to each other through their geographies as well as parallel and sometimes overlapping histories. Among them, besides India and Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and more recently Maldives have also enacted competition legislation, while Bhutan has a competition policy, and Afghanistan a draft competition legislation which is yet to be enacted. This chapter outlines the pre-conditions of transfer in each of these countries and charts the progress of their competition regimes along the deliberation–enactment–implementation continuum. In doing so, the chapter analyses the motivations, mechanisms, and institutions engaged by each of these countries and evaluates the compatibility and legitimacy generated, or where the adoption has not been completed, likely to be generated, in the course of adoption.

Sanctions are not only central to competition law enforcement for their punitive and deterrent value but are also important indicators of the successful performance of competition law authorities. The Indian and Pakistani competition legislations empower the CCI and CCP to impose both monetary and behavioural sanctions as appropriate, and in the years they have been operational, both authorities have utilised the full range of these powers, albeit with varying success. This chapter examines the penal strategies of the CCI and the CCP as manifested in the sanctions and penalties that they have imposed over time, and argues that these strategies as well as the extent to which the CCI and CCP have succeeded in recovering the penalties are directly impacted by the compatibility and legitimacy generated in the adoption process, and indirectly impacted by the establishment of success of these countries in adopting the competition enforcement infrastructure envisaged in the adopted legislations.