Geography of War: Asia, Southeast

Warfare across the lands of Southeast Asia has been shaped by geographic, demographic, and topographic factors since the earliest settlement of peoples in the region. Sustained large-scale conflict, while found throughout this corner of Asia, has been most pronounced on the mainland, stretching across what are today the states of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. These conflicts and clashes have often seen lowland and coastal populations fighting one another but have also seen frequent wars between lowland and upland populations. Conflict in the island world of Southeast Asia, notably in what are now Indonesia and the Philippines, while frequent, has been on a smaller scale, as populations were quite scattered. Large states rarely formed before the modern period, and warfare was localized, usually focused ...