THINK PIECE 19 SUMMARY and extremism in Southeast Asia have unfortu­nately been associated with Islam as seen in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand and have contributed to the hybridization of security provision in these countries. actors, such as the mil­itary­, the police, the defense bureaucracy, and politicians are perceived to have been accountable for the rise of these twin phenomena in Southeast Asia, and could be major causes of the hybrid­ization ­of security provision in the subregion. cooperation to stem the impact of external forces like daesh/ISIS/ISIL have been stepping up in recent years, as seen in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ­(ASEAN). 01 Ethnic Separatism and Religious Extremism in Southeast Asia: Implications for the Monopoly on the Use of Force 1 by Carolina G. Hernandez INTRODUCTION Southeast Asia offers a good case study on the issue of ethnic sepa­ratism and religious extremism, as well as on the implications these processes for the state’s monopoly on the use of force. This region illustrates how the use of force has increasingly proliferated beyond the reach of and in opposition to the state. This region is a classic illustration of the Global Reflection Group’s main findings regarding the issue of the ›state’s monopoly on the use of force‹ – namely, that this monopoly is more a myth than a reality, in particular because the state, with very few exceptions and under very restricted circumstanc­es in both the Global North and the Global South, has been faced with the proliferation or hybridization of the provision of security. This development is driven by a variety of factors, including ethnic sepa­ratism – largely shaped by Western colonization, which was attended by arbitrary demarcation of national borders that broke up once rel­atively homogenous ethnic communities – and religious extremism. The root causes vary between different cultures and regions, though they share the reality of rising social inequities, forms of exclusion, and more general deficits in social, economic, and political systems of governance. The present think piece focuses on Southeast Asia as a region exhib­iting country-specific problems regarding the monopoly on the use of force. It will describe how ethnic separatism and religious extrem­ism have contributed to the proliferation or hybridization of security provision that challenge the state’s monopoly on the use of force in different countries. Four countries – Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philip­pines, and Thailand – will be used to describe the problem of ethnic separatism, while three countries – namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines – would serve as examples of religious extremism in the region. From these two sets of discussions, the paper will draw 1 Strictly a presentation draft and not to be cited.