Thousands of books have been written on how to achieve security. But the victims of insecurity since World War II have numbered in the tens of millions, nearly half of them in Asia, caught in armed conflicts and attendant famine or disease, and the damage has cost trillions of dollars. Another book on security is hardly superfluous but instead an additional asset in the search for a less lethal and destructive way of conducting inter-and intra-state relations, not least in the Asian region. It is our belief that fresh thinking about security concepts can lead to more perceptive studies by security scholars and more discriminating policies by Asian leaders and those of governments dealing with Asia such as the United States. We have endeavoured to produce a book that spans not only a variety of security threats and policies in a number of Asian countries but also a generous interval of time, thus achieving a measure of historical perspective as well as geo-political scope. We have been less concerned to quantify concepts, test hypotheses, or survey Asian countries systematically than to inform the reader of pressing issues, illuminate important themes, and put forward promising conceptual innovations in the fields of security studies and security policies. Building on the works of our academic predecessors, we hope this volume will be of value to our contemporaries and successors in the ongoing intellectual project of sharpening analysis and motivating research. We hope also to reach out to the security-policy community to contribute to improving Asian security not only at the regional and state levels but also in the economic, ethno-cultural and community spheres, ultimately enhancing human security.