The Javanese way of law: early modern sloka phenomena

these powers with new security legislation. Whiting argues that the result in this case is reflective of an emergency legality at the core of Malaysia’s legal system that results in a jurisprudence of legal exceptionalism. Of course, the capacity of UMNO leadership to circumvent the law for its own purposes was pushed to the extreme in the 1MDB corruption scandal. Kerstin Steiner provides an excellent detailed account of the enormous flows of money involved in the mismanagement of 1MDB and the kleptocratic efforts by Najib to limit the government’s ability to investigate the collapse of the sovereign investment vehicle. Tricia Yeoh presents a chapter on the Malaysian oil and gas sector in light of standards of corporate good governance. In her discussion, she dwells briefly on the Petroleum Development Act and tensions between state and federal governments over oil and gas revenues. Of course, this would become an important ‘fault line of the new Malaysia’, in Lemière’s words, as oiland gas-rich states in the wake of the fall of the UMNO-led BN government sought to gain leverage against a now-weakened federal government. In general, revisiting Illusions of Democracy several years after its publication indicates very clearly that many of the new fault lines forming in Malaysian politics are directly related to the divides and structures already in place under Najib’s government.