Vol 1 No 2 (2025): December

Religious extremism presents a major challenge to contemporary legal, political, and religious institutions, particularly when violent groups invoke religious law to legitimize violence and political authority. Although previous studies have examined radicalization, terrorism, and religious extremism, limited research has comparatively explored how extremist organizations construct legal legitimacy through pseudolegal interpretations of Islamic law. This study aims to analyze how ISIS and Boko Haram employ pseudolegal reasoning to justify violence, establish alternative governance systems, and claim religious authority. Using a comparative doctrinal-normative legal approach, the study examines extremist legal narratives through the lenses of Legal Pluralism Theory and Radicalization Theory. The analysis is based on organizational publications, ideological statements, and relevant scholarly literature on Islamic law and extremism. The findings reveal that both ISIS and Boko Haram selectively reinterpret Islamic legal concepts, particularly takfir, to legitimize excommunication, violence, and coercive governance. Takfir functions as a central pseudolegal mechanism through which political opposition is transformed into a religious offense, enabling violence against perceived opponents. The study further demonstrates that these interpretations substantially diverge from mainstream Islamic jurisprudence by disregarding contextual interpretation, scholarly consensus, proportionality, public welfare (maslahah), and the protection of human dignity. The novelty of this study lies in introducing pseudolegal interpretation as a comparative framework linking legal pluralism, radicalization, and extremist governance. However, the study is limited to documentary and textual sources and does not incorporate field-based empirical evidence.

Extreme climate change has intensified pressures on environmental governance, requiring states to reconceptualize state responsibility beyond traditional compliance-based regulation toward preventive and adaptive governance obligations. However, existing scholarship has largely focused on domestic legal frameworks or sectoral adaptation policies, with limited comparative socio-legal analysis on how state responsibility is operationalized across jurisdictions with different institutional capacities and climate vulnerability profiles. This study addresses this gap by comparatively examining Indonesia and Portugal to explain how legal frameworks and institutional governance structures shape the implementation of climate-related state responsibility under escalating environmental risks. Using a socio-legal comparative approach, the study combines doctrinal analysis of environmental and climate governance with qualitative interpretation of institutional practices and policy responses to climate risks. The analysis focuses on Portugal’s climate adaptation system within the European Union’s multi-level governance architecture, emphasizing how legal norms are translated into governance practice in contrast with Indonesia’s environmental governance context. The findings show that differences in climate governance outcomes are driven less by formal legal provisions and more by variations in institutional integration, policy coherence, and enforcement capacity. Portugal demonstrates a more consolidated and preventive governance model characterized by cross-sectoral coordination and embedded adaptation planning, while Indonesia reflects an evolving yet fragmented governance structure with limited integration of climate risk data into decision-making processes. The study contributes by developing the concept of adaptive state responsibility, conceptualizing state responsibility as an interaction between legal obligation, institutional capacity, and climate risk governance in comparative environmental law.

The expansion of digitalisation, platform-based employment, and labour market restructuring has intensified debates on how labour law can balance economic flexibility with the protection of workers’ rights. While Indonesian labour reforms have largely focused on enhancing investment competitiveness and employment flexibility, limited comparative scholarship has examined how foreign legal systems successfully integrate labour adaptability with comprehensive worker protection. This study addresses that gap by analysing Portugal’s labour protection framework and evaluating its relevance for Indonesian labour law reform. Using a normative juridical method and comparative legal approach, the research examines key regulatory areas, including employment contracts, teleworking arrangements, working-time regulation, parental leave, occupational health and safety, employment termination, severance compensation, and social security protection. The findings indicate that Portugal has developed a balanced labour governance model that combines labour market flexibility with strong legal safeguards through social dialogue, collective bargaining, welfare-oriented labour policies, and adaptive regulation of emerging forms of work. The study further finds that Indonesia’s labour law framework continues to face challenges related to digital platform workers, remote work regulation, labour protection enforcement, and social security coverage. The novelty of this research lies in its comparative examination of Portuguese labour law as a reference for developing a more responsive and socially balanced labour governance framework in Indonesia. The study contributes to comparative labour law scholarship by demonstrating that labour flexibility and workers’ rights protection can coexist within an integrated regulatory system supported by legal certainty, social justice, and sustainable employment principles.

Lecturer salary inequality remains a persistent challenge in Indonesian higher education and has attracted increasing attention due to its implications for academic welfare, educational quality, and institutional sustainability. While previous studies have examined lecturer welfare, labor protection, and wage standards, limited research has integrated distributive justice theory, higher education governance, and comparative regional perspectives to explain the structural roots of remuneration disparities. This study aims to analyze lecturer salary inequality in Indonesia from a distributive justice perspective and identify the legal and institutional factors contributing to wage disparities. Employing a normative legal research method with a socio-legal analytical approach, the study examines statutory regulations, policy documents, and relevant academic literature through qualitative content analysis. The findings reveal that lecturer salary inequality is structurally shaped by fragmented regulatory frameworks, differences in employment status, uneven institutional funding capacities, and weak coordination between labor law and higher education governance. Comparative evidence further indicates that lecturer remuneration in Indonesia remains relatively lower than in several Southeast Asian countries, reflecting broader disparities in academic labor protection and educational financing. The novelty of this study lies in its integration of distributive justice theory, labor law analysis, and higher education governance perspectives to explain salary inequality as a structural governance issue rather than merely an economic problem. However, this study is limited by its reliance on normative legal analysis and secondary data without extensive empirical or cross-country quantitative evidence. The findings contribute to ongoing discussions on legal harmonization, equitable remuneration, and higher education governance reform.

This article examines the digital marketization of nikah siri (unregistered marriage) in Indonesia within the framework of legal pluralism and its implications for marriage governance. The growing promotion of nikah siri services through social media reflects a structural shift in which unregistered marriage practices are transformed into a digital and commercialized marketplace, generating significant legal and regulatory concerns. Indonesian marriage law, particularly Law No. 1 of 1974 as amended by Law No. 16 of 2019, Government Regulation No. 9 of 1975, and Ministerial Regulation (PMA) No. 30 of 2024, requires official marriage registration, yet unregistered practices persist within overlapping systems of state law, Islamic law, and customary norms. The study employs a socio-legal approach combined with doctrinal legal analysis, using secondary legal sources, regulatory documents, and publicly available digital data. The findings show that platform-based promotion creates regulatory grey zones that weaken state enforcement and expand informal marriage markets involving intermediaries, religious actors, and service brokers. The novelty of this study lies in conceptualizing nikah siri as a digitally mediated, market-driven phenomenon shaped by the interaction of legal pluralism and platform economy dynamics. The study contributes to socio-legal scholarship by highlighting structural limitations in Indonesia’s marriage governance, particularly the gap between legal norms and enforcement capacity. Strengthening regulation requires legal reform and institutional reinforcement of marriage registration alongside adaptive digital governance strategies. The study is limited to doctrinal and socio-legal analysis based on secondary and publicly available digital sources, without fieldwork or interviews, suggesting avenues for future empirical research.