Although making regional coordination is a real challenge, the commonalities and differences of these four countries in Asia Pacific—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Australia—are useful for comparative analysis. Some of the questions tackled in this book include: To what extent have state responses to the War on Terror been shaped by domestic politics? How do Muslim political leaders position themselves vis-à-vis the United States and their own domestic constituencies? What has been the role of Islam in relation to internal ethnic tensions where it is the majority religion and where it is the minority religion? To what extent is the conflict in the southern Philippines a reflection of historic grievances, localized feuds, and global fault lines?
Published in 2009 for the Philippines-Australia Studies Network (PASN), Ateneo de Manila University.