Kuala Lampur, Sept. 25 -- When people think of South-east Asia, they often imagine a single geographic or cultural unit: ten, soon eleven, countries strung between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Some reduce it to a simple binary of "maritime South-east Asia" and "continental South-east Asia," as if seas and rivers alone defined the contours of its diversity. But South-east Asia has always been more than a tidy cartography.

It is a multiplicity of lived experiences, political trajectories, economic contradictions, and historical legacies.

To understand this region as merely a sum of its physical parts is to miss the profound complexities that animate it.

Today, South-east Asia is at once aspirational, fractured, dangerous, emancipatory...