Amitav Acharya has written a splendidly ambitious book. Travelling from the discipline of International Relations to the historiography of Southeast Asia and back again, it draws upon a range of methodologies to analyse the issue of identity in the configuration of Southeast Asia. But it provides more than an academic assessment. With this book, Acharya must be judged to have contributed not just to the study of Southeast Asian regionalism, but to the process itself."" - Anthony Milner, Basham Professor of Asian History, Australian National University.