Over recent decades a number of states in South and Southeast Asia have been troubled by armed separatist movements that have sought to create their own independent polity via physical separation from the parent state. Various forms of autonomy have been promoted by policy-makers and donors as the most democratic way of accommodating separatist insurgents in ethnically, religiously, politically and socially divided states. Despite this, remarkably few states in Asia have succeeded in winning over their aggrieved separatist minorities to the dominant nationalist cause. This situation has created a real dilemma for many states of how much freedom to grant nationalist minority groups without ceding control over their sovereign territories to separatists.

This central dilemma of conferring democratic freedoms to sub-state nationalists without compromising state sovereignty has been reflected in the policy choices of governments in South and Southeast Asia. On the one hand, some governments in the region have sought to divert secessionist demands through offers of autonomy and other forms of self-rule. On the other hand, policies of forced assimilation have frequently been employed in a bid to crush armed separatist movements militarily as a precursor to peace. In South and Southeast Asia, many national governments have pursued a dual-track persuasive-repressive policy approach aimed at compelling armed separatists to comply with unilateral offers of autonomy through state coercion and military conquest.

Resolving this dilemma of reconciling minority independence demands with state claims to sovereignty is by no means a simple or straightforward process. Even when parent states respond to secessionist challenges by deemphasizing a military approach and adopting ameliorative policies aimed at winning would-be separatists back into the broader national fold, separatist insurgents can, and sometimes do, attempt to garner political leverage for their nationalist cause through violent means. Autonomy can strengthen armed separatist movements if they use their increased access to state power and resources to mobilize in opposition to state authority (Cornell 2002, p. 252). For this reason, as John-Mary Kauzya points out, “the difference between decentralization and disintegration is very thin” (2005, p. 4). Striking the right balance between competing nationalistic agendas depends upon a basic level of consensus among the key political actors about the sort of autonomy formula to apply in the realignment of centre-periphery power relations (Horowitz 1981, pp. 166–67).