(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)This volume of essays explores the roles and significance of political in a variety of Asian-and particularly Southeast Asian-settings. The essays collectively have four modest aims. First, they set out to show that a networks approach can capture the dynamism and resilience of political interactions where actors are operating in different contexts. Second, the emphasis placed on of politics in this volume complements the wider attention that analysts based in anthropology, sociology, and economic development have paid to social within Asian studies. Third, the volume is intended to demonstrate that certain basic conditions of apply to different locales, times, and conditions. For example, communications and technologies, albeit very different in their development or sophistication over decades, remain crucial factors in networks. Finally, the essays collectively emphasize the roles of individuals and personalities in the formation of political networks. In quantitatively oriented network theory, the nodes and links of are taken to be interchangeable or display the same character. That does not hold in the realm of politics, where human agency may be uniquely important. Where he or she forms a node, each politician, activist, or comrade has a personal character, different from that of other nodes, such that their human interactions frequently shape the strength, influence, or effectiveness of the links among them. Thus, while two articles in this issue show some direct engagement with ideas developed by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (2003), the investigation and analysis of actual political must go beyond abstract principles of network theories to a critical understanding of the personal peculiarities, ideological tendencies, and even career constraints of the actors involved.I Big Pictures and Large CategoriesIt is not difficult to see why other categories and units of analysis may have been preferred over as academic analyses of Asian politics engaged with the social, economic, and political fortunes and misfortunes of states in the region. Once past the 1970s, when struggles for independence, wars of national liberation, and Cold War conflicts had mostly entered the annals of history, studies of Asian politics were dominated by thematic issues linked to the occurrence of the Asian Miracle (World Bank 1993)1) in its different subregional and national variations. The foci of research appeared, accordingly, to be redirected toward the political economy of late (export-oriented) industrialization (Amsden 1989; Haggard 1990; Doner and Hawes 1995; Jomo et al. 1997), the growing integration of national economies with global markets, regional initiatives in economic cooperation and integration, and so on. With the 1997 financial crises, however, it was evident that even East Asian pathways of hopeful structural transformation could end in painful structural adjustments (Jomo 1998; Robison et al. 2000), with both being paved as much with latent contradictions and disruptive conflicts as with the technocratic implementation of rationally formulated policies and plans.In late twentieth century East Asia, moreover, no less than in other regions at other times, deep and extensive economic transformation produced winners and losers at the same time that it generated growth and development. Besides, winning and losing social classes and groups were liable between them to produce tumultuous surges of antiauthoritarian opposition (Boudreau 2002; Heryanto and Mandal 2004), organized pressures for democratization (Anek 1997; Uhlin 1997; Case 2002), mobilization around populist appeals (Mizuno and Pasuk 2009), and pushes toward many permutations of power realignment and redistribution. Occasionally launched to preempt those political trends but more often conducted in response to them were repressive strikes or military coups in Burma, China, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand; exercises in oligarchic reconstitution (Anderson 1998, Chapters 8 and 9; Pasuk and Baker 2004; Robison and Hadiz 2004); and the assertion of different statist or hegemonic discourses of national identity, ethnicity, and religion (Brown 1997; Callahan 2005; Khoo 2005). …