Southeast Asia has been the theater of some of the most brutal wars since World War II. The Vietnam War was the most lasting interstate war with considerable spillover effects and ramifications, not only for regional states but also for US foreign policy for ensuing decades. Since the end of the Cold War, the region has managed to limit the number of interstate wars through a variety of mechanisms—most notably the Association of Southeast Asian Nations forum and the extensive economic interdependence that has emerged among ASEAN states. However, the regional peace has not become a deep peace inasmuch as it is not based on internal peace as well as a solid pluralistic security community as in Western Europe. Part of the reason are the unabated intrastate conflicts in the region. While some have been resolved, others have cropped up or refused to subside.

What explains this continued high level of internal conflict and violence in the region, which has had much success in preventing interstate conflict? The two books under review offer valuable perspectives on this issue. The volume edited by Jacob Bercovitch and Karl DeRouen contains many chapters on the broader conflict patterns in the region, while the book by Justin Hastings offers an analysis of two extremist groups in Indonesia, Jemaah Islamiyah and Garekan Aceh Merdak (Free Aceh Movement), that have engaged in devastating terrorist attacks in the past. The latter also offers an interesting perspective on the pernicious impact of globalization on regional security order and the limited gains made by the states in the region in their struggle against nonstate actors during the past decade.

The edited volume, Unraveling Internal Conflicts in East Asia and the Pacific, contains 13 chapters under the rubric of four sections. Together these chapters offer a systematic analysis of the reasons so many internal conflicts have occurred in Southeast Asia and why some of them have persisted for decades. The introductory chapter points out that while there have been 62 internal conflicts spread over a period of 58 years, there has been a substantial increase in the number of such conflicts since 1986. Although several of them have since been resolved, new ones seem to crop up periodically. For instance, from 1986 to 1990, 11 new conflicts occurred. Of the 62 conflicts, 34% are recurrences. In short, there have been a disproportionately large number of internal conflicts for a region that has seen little interstate warfare. The chapters in Sections I and II address the various features of conflict, especially the problem of intractability and recurrence, and the role of religion, especially Islam in civil wars in the region. The three chapters in Section I offer a concise review of the conflict management literature, especially the limits of third-party mediation, be it by foreign governments or by international organizations.

Section III deals with external actors, and these chapters are perhaps the most valuable contributions in this volume. Marie Olson Lounsbery and Alethia Cook discuss mediation as a method of conflict resolution. In several of the cases they study, mediation failed because parties did not approach it in good faith, especially the governmental actors who failed to implement the commitment agreed upon under external pressure. Clair Newcombe examines the role of the World Bank as a major player in addressing internal conflicts in the region. She argues that financial calculations of actors can be manipulated through World Bank intervention, and the potential for sanctions could work toward peace building. The World Bank's contributions in East Timor, Cambodia, and Papua New Guinea show that the bank has played a key role in the reconstruction phase, thereby preventing conflicts from sliding into perpetuity. The ability of the bank and the states concerned to address underlying factors such as endemic poverty is crucial in this process. Barbara Kemper's Aceh case study offers a succinct analysis of the causes for the emergence, persistence, and settlement of the conflict. The role that mediators played is also discussed. Track II mediation can be significant in conflict resolution, as evidenced by this case study. The Susannah Gordon chapter on peacekeeping in East Timor and the Solomon Islands shows that while integrated peacekeeping missions can bring about conflict mitigation, they are not sufficient for long-term peace building. A bit more discussion of what else is needed for durable peace would have been useful here. The case of Myanmar is presented by Marie Lall to show the limits of external actors in addressing an essentially domestic problem emanating from the multiple faultiness of the Myanmar society.

One drawback of the volume is that it does not address the discrepancy in the incidence of intrastate versus interstate conflicts. Why the region has managed to produce regional peace but not internal peace is a puzzle. Engaging the extant international relations literature on regional peace and security community building since the 1970s would have been useful for this purpose (it is notable that the work of Amitav Acharya, the leading international relations scholar of the region, is barely cited in any of the book's chapters). Southeast Asian states have managed to create a separate peace through informal mechanisms and norms of good neighborly relations. But they have been extremely reluctant to take on the internal conflict issues in the name of sovereignty rights, as well as from fear that the ASEAN mechanism would fall apart if they have to tackle internal conflicts, as countries would not cooperate and would accuse ASEAN of meddling. This may have something to do with the new states trying to consolidate national territories and their hard-won sovereignty, and an extreme reluctance to allow secessionist or subnational movements to succeed in the region. This volume, despite its many strengths, would have been a better one had there been sufficient focus on the international relations literature and the relationship between differing interstate and intrastate norms. It is, however, a major breakthrough in terms of explaining the many internal conflicts that nest the region and the tendency to use coercive force internally by weak states. The imbalances between state and society seem unrectified in Southeast Asia despite several decades of nation building.

Key violent challengers to states in the region have been nonstate actors, including insurgent groups. These movements are no longer region-based but are transnational in their reach. The weak states of the region have been the theaters of such activities, to a great extent, due to the ability of the groups to utilize new technologies, such as the Internet, telecommunication networks, and transportation systems that are widely available today. This may well be a key reason for the persistence of high levels of internal conflict in Southeast Asia. Hastings's No Man's Land is a bold effort to tackle this issue of transnational networks emanating from the region. Hastings discusses three sets of clandestine actors: the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, the insurgent group Free Aceh Movement, and the organized groups of smugglers and maritime pirates. He also compares the groups with other similar groups, such as Al Qaeda, the Tamil Tigers, and Somali pirates.

The book is the result of the author's painstaking fieldwork in the region. Because its arguments are based on extensive interviews and meetings with insurgent leaders, offering thick description of the situation on the ground, the book has an air of credibility that many other works on terrorism lack.

The discussion on the Free Aceh Movement, especially the movement's ability to create transnational networks of weapons, money, and advocacy across many countries in the region, is interesting. However, the movement's failure to bring about the independence of Aceh shows the limitations of such groups' activism against concerted state and international opposition. The humanitarian crisis caused by the 2004 Asian tsunami accelerated the process of their retrenchment. The criminal networks have also had limited successes in the post-9/11 environment. The varying outcomes, especially in different time periods, show that state capacity matters most in suppressing or removing the nonstate actor threat. In many instances, states were able to create “choking points” by using the same technologies that clandestine groups have used against them. In some respects, states have an advantage in terms of their superior abilities to utilize modern technologies, as well as their extensive control over territories.

The Indonesian terror network Jemaah Islamiyah has been able to adopt new technologies in creating a transnational network, and was able to carry out more than a dozen attacks between 2000 and 2003, the most prominent one the Bali bombings of October 2002. However, this movement also faced considerable difficulties in its quest to establish an Islamic Caliphate across Southeast Asia, especially given the intense opposition it faced since the September 11, 2001, attacks. Today, the group is largely defeated in the region, and Indonesia is touted as a success story in the fight against terrorism.

This is an excellent book on the intricacies of clandestine group activity. Its key lesson is that states facing challenges to their authority from nonstate actors—whether insurgency movements, Islamic terrorist organizations, or criminal groups—are capable of meeting these challenges more vigorously than generally assumed if they focus their attention on it. The post-9/11 global focus on terrorism has, in some respects, strengthened the coercive capacity of some of these countries, as internal and external pressures gave states a much-needed opportunity to face the challenges from nonstate actors. However, it is yet to be seen if this is a permanent state of affairs or a temporary development, and whether nonstate actors will come up with new methods and strategies to outmaneuver the state.

Both of these books offer valuable insights into the conditions under which internal conflicts can be resolved. Reading them together makes two things clear. The first is that conflict escalation and entrenchment within states has a lot to do with how states develop and exercise their capacity to handle group grievances. The second is that external actors play a pivotal role in intrastate conflicts, by either abetting them or helping state elites to resolve them. For those concerned about the spread of such conflicts, the good news is that not all states are becoming weaker in the contemporary globalized world as some believe. Their capacities have increased in some cases, while in others more external help may be needed to embellish capacity building and the creation of just and fair societies. The substantial weakening of the terrorist network Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia is a good example of this contention.