This book is a collection of work by scholars currently pursuing research on human security and
insecurities in Southeast Asia. It deals with a set of 'insecurities' that is not readily
understood or measurable. As such it conceptually locates the threats and impediments to
'human security' within relationships of risk uncertainty safety and trust. At the same time
it presents a wide variety of investigations and approaches from both localized and regional
perspectives. By focusing on the human and relational dimensions of insecurities in Southeast
Asia it highlights the ways in which vulnerable and precarious circumstances (human
insecurities) are part of daily life for large numbers of people in Southeast Asia and are
mainly beyond their immediate control. Many of the situations people experience in Southeast
Asia represent the real outcomes of a range of largely unacknowledged socio-cultural-economic
transformations interlinked by local national regional and global forces factors and
interests. Woven from experience and observations of life at various sites in Southeast Asia
the contributions in this volume give an internal and critical perspective to a complex and
manifold issue. They draw attention to a variety of the less-than-obvious threats to human
security and show how perplexing those threats can be. All of which underscores the
significance of multidisciplinary approaches in rethinking and responding to the complex array
of conditioning factors and interests underlying human insecurities in Southeast Asia.
