Asian regionalism is a major topic of research for the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) at Stanford University. This volume is the second of a three-part series of books on Asian regionalism that the center is publishing. The first volume, Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia (2007), looked at the tensions between increasing regional integration and rising nationalism in Northeast Asia. Its content was based on an international conference that was held at Stanford in May 2006.

The following year, in May 2007, my colleague, Professor Donald K. Emmerson, led a conference at Shorenstein APARC that examined the interplay between security, democracy, and regionalism in Southeast Asia. This book is an edited volume of the revised conference papers, written by scholars from across Southeast Asia and outside the region.

For the final installment of our inquiry into Asian regionalism, we held a third conference, in June 2008, in cooperation with the Observer Research Foundation of India, which focused on the prospects for regionalism in South Asia. The papers from that gathering—which brought together scholars from across South Asia with experts from Russia, China and the United States—will be published in 2009.

This book and its companion volumes offer provocative, detailed perspectives by some of the finest scholars working in Asian studies today. In publishing these books, we hope to bring this important material to a wider audience, and thereby to advance understanding of Asian regionalism and its impact on nations, both within Asia and beyond.