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This article will provide an overview of one specific non-military threat that is beginning to assume greater prominence on south-east Asia's broadened security agenda: political terrorism.1 Although by no means new to the south-east Asian environment, for much of the twentieth century its importance was sidelined and, in a sense 'contained', by the more pressing concern over US-Soviet nuclear rivalry. With the end of the Cold War, however, the 'bottle has been uncorked' on a variety of lower level threats, with issues such as terrorism now taking on greater prominence and relevance in their own right as significant regional and national security concerns.