Panel organizers
Hoko Horii – Leiden University; Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society / Kobe University
Kota Fukui – Osaka University, Japan
Hiroshi Fukurai – University of California, Santa Cruz
We panel organizers are planning a conference panel “Containing COVID-19 in Asia: Comparative and Cross-national Studies of Compliance, Accountability, and Enforcement in the Age of the Pandemic” at the ALSA annual conference 2021, 17-18 September 2021(https://www.alsa.network/announcements). We are currently looking for those who are interested in taking part in this panel. See below for the panel description.
If you are interested, please send your contact details, a short bio (no more than 100 words), and a presentation abstract (no more than 200 words), by 23rd July 2021 to h.horii@law.leidenuniv.nl.
Should you be interested to fulfill another role (discussant or roundtable speaker), please do let us know as well. Please also do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, ideas, or remarks.
Panel description
During the current coronavirus pandemic, various mitigation measures led to a massive, unprecedented behavioural and policy change across the globe. The mitigation measures have had a wide range of influence on both our individual behaviour and international relations. This panel aims at studying these changes through the analytical lens of compliance, a well-studied subject in socio-legal literature.
The first session deals with individual and institutional compliance to the state mandate (e.g., mask wearing, work-from-home rules, limitations on business management). Why and when do people comply or not comply with such mitigation measures? The first waves of the studies on the COVID measures compliance mainly focused on North Atlantic States, and they identified that compliance depended mostly on practical abilities and intrinsic motivation to comply, rather than on deterrence of obedience out of fear. Would the same result apply in Asia? This panel discusses possible variables and empirical methods to evaluate them.
The second session focuses on international compliance, in which the state system generates and follows policies that seek cross-national cooperation to contain COVID, such as optimization of vaccine utilization. How does each state enforce international collaborative mitigation measures, and what entity (e.g., World Health Organization, regional alliances, and powerful state systems) is best suited to consolidate such collaborative efforts? A previous panel at Law and Society Association conference 2021 has explored the reason that many “socialist-oriented” and/or “economically-less advanced” states have largely succeeded in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic more effectively than “economically-prosperous,” “highly-advanced free-market” economies. Does the difference in political and economic orientation also play a part in differentiating the state engagement in international cooperation to contain the spread of COVID?
By discussing these possible compliance variables over the two sessions, this panel prepares for a prospective comparative research project to investigate variables for (non-)compliance to COVID mitigation measures in Asian countries. Such comparative study will not only contribute to the socio-legal studies on compliance, but also informs effective policy-making during the pandemic and beyond.
Hoko Horii 