Armies and Societies in Southeast Asia adds to the small but growing body of publications on warfare in Southeast Asia and colonial armies. Its chapters are written by a multi-national and multi-disciplinary team of authors who are experts in their field and who bring in their ‘disciplinary’ strengths, such as history, sociology, social anthropology, political science, and philology, in analyzing a wide range of sources, including royal chronicles, missionary dictionaries, colonial archival documents, VCDs, and face-to-face interviews. Military-society relations are examined in a wide range of ways: traditional strategies of augmenting populations, mutinies and mutiny attempts, imperial anxieties, Japanese military legacies, the trans-oceanic experiences of Southeast Asian and European soldiers, post-war demobilizations and post-conflict biographies, and the transformation of communist guerrillas into guardians of the state and their development of capitalist enterprises. This volume will be of interest to Southeast Asianists and military historians alike because it covers not only traditional territorial grounds, thematic terrains, and temporal landscapes but also extends to individuals and further includes the national, regional, and transnational lives of military institutions that have often been insufficiently covered in previous studies due to the complexity of the region and the difficulty for scholars to master all the required languages.