While social disorganization and anomie theories are generally employed to explain the disproportionate representation of racial minorities in the offending population, such perspectives often fail to address the intersectionalities of class, race, religion, gender, and historicity that structurally marginalize the Malay youth in Singapore. This article hence adopts a neocolonial criminological approach in explaining racial disparity in crime, particularly how the Malay youth establish their dominance in gangs through hyper- and exaggerated forms of masculinity. Drawing on interviews with Singaporean Malay and Chinese individuals who were current and former gang members, this study shows that Malay youth tended to exhibit a blended masculinity comprising “Malayness” and “Chineseness” to compensate for their marginal status, highlighting their agentic capacity in strategically tapping upon an inventory of race resources to negotiate their gendered identities and attain status and economic mobility in the illegitimate society.

The dominance of Western models of crime and criminal justice and the nascent emergence of “borderless” criminological insights precipitated by forces of globalization and transnationalization raises serious questions about their universal applicability to explain crime across time and space. Amidst the dearth of criminological work on Asia, this introduction to the Special Issue on “Crime and Punishment in Asia” commits itself to developing and honing the frontiers of an “Asian criminology” by drawing scholarly attention to the empirical and contextual specificities of the region. Such an effort is not directed towards demarcating “Asia” as a socially and culturally distinct geopolitical entity from the “West”. Rather, it is to critically reflect upon the alleged and actual variances between Asian and Western societies including the broader differences in social orientation – collectivism vs individualism and duty-based moral obligations vs rights-based beliefs respectively as well as documenting the heterogeneity and particularities within Asia. To that end, crime in South Asian and Southeast Asian contexts and political and economic changes which have given rise to novel “strains” of crime and newer criminal opportunities, remain under theorized. Ultimately, the advancement of an Asian criminological discourse in this special issue is not to merely acknowledge scholarly attempts that transpose current Anglo-Saxon models onto Asian empirical contexts or reject them, but transform existing theories and develop regional alternatives that are validated by and arise from particular empirical investigations into crime and criminal justice across Asia.

The continued emphasis on a decontextualized nuclear family in Asia has often obscured experiences of re-partnered individuals and stepfamilies, wherein transitions including couple dissolution and remarriage or cohabitation have had particular implications for family well-being and social mobility. The eight papers in this special issue expand scholarship beyond acknowledging the increasing prevalence of re-partnership and stepfamilies seeking to facilitate cross-cultural comparisons within the region, and between Asia and the West where notable advancements have been made in theorising diverse family processes. The pertinence of extended family ties and the cultural pressures of collectivism advance shared perspectives of re-partnership and stepfamily formation across East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia. At the same time, drawing from quantitative and qualitative methodologies, these papers direct attention to the heterogeneity in re-partnership pathways where broader social categories such as class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion and historicity differentially intersect across national and socio-political contexts.

Using a qualitative life history approach, this article offers to enhance our understanding of how remarriage impacts social mobility trajectories amongst ethnic minority women in Singapore. In particular, the attention to ethnic minority Malay women’s biographies reveals how the intersections of “ethnicity” and “class” render visibility to how re-partnership entails social exclusion that is morally and culturally coded concealing the emotional and material struggles that women in stepfamilies cope with. In comparing the lived experiences of remarried middle-class Malay women with their working-class counterparts, this article argues that stepfamily formation in Singapore in fact tends to deepen rather than mitigate vulnerabilities, particularly for the latter, thus failing to live up to the lure of economic stability that repartnerships are conventionally assumed to provide. In so doing, the article also argues for a nuanced understanding of social mobility as a non-linear process rather than an outcome.

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