Following the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States
and the Bali bombings in Indonesia the following year, Southeast
Asia came under scrutiny for its role in the rise of militant
Islamism. Generally, scholarship on militant Islamism in
Southeast Asia branched into two approaches: terrorism experts
tended to see the problem through the prism of al- Qaeda, with
Southeast Asian jihadists following orders from their leaders
outside the region; Indonesia specialists, meanwhile, countered
this al-Qaeda-centric approach by emphasising the local
Indonesian factors driving Southeast Asian jihadism.
In this thesis, by contrast, I focus on the regional scale. I
find that Southeast Asia, for a time, emerged as one of the most
important places in the world for the mobilization of global
jihadist attacks against the West due to a historical and
geographical process unique to the region. Drawing on the
emerging field of assemblage theory, I argue that over time a
regional jihadist assemblage formed in Southeast Asia—a
cross-border constellation of networks, groups, and material
elements—and that it was the mobilization opportunities
presented by this assemblage that made Southeast Asia so
attractive to global jihadists. Analysing a wealth of original
interview and documentary material, I trace the gradual
development of this regional assemblage over time and space, from
its origins in the cycles of conflict between jihadists and the
state in Indonesia in the late 1940s to the crucial role played
by Southeast Asians in the attacks of 9/11
