ABSTRACT
Historians of Southeast Asia writing about warfare in the region have been addressing what came to be known as "war and society" since long before the term gained currency among academic military historians. There are historians who combine regional expertise with the skills of a military historian to produce substantive studies of war and society in Southeast Asia. The first set concentrates on whether systems of warfare in premodern Southeast Asia can be used to justify the geographic category "Southeast Asia". The second major question addressed by historians of war and society in Southeast Asia concerns debates over what constitutes "Europe-centric" versus "Asia-centric" approaches. Finally, the third set of questions asks whether the Vietnam War can be studied as a Southeast Asian historical event centered on the experiences of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Thai societies affected by it.
