large-scale governance unfeasible, and so the region became a culturally and linguistically diverse tapestry of semi- or fully-autonomous local groups. As European colonialism penetrated the region, starting similarly from the lowlands, the still-impenetrable highland regions became the borderlands between colonial powers, which largely remain unchanged as the boundaries of today’s nation-states. The degree of diversity in those regions, now carved up by contemporary borders, still holds true, as does the persistence of significant ethnic majority communities within today’s nation-states: the Bamar, Thai and Vietnamese ethnic groups make up significant majorities in each respective state. The location of other groups—contemporary ‘minority’ groups, as they comprise a demographically smaller and nonpolitically-dominant portion of the population—is often near or across border regions, rendering them at the geographic margins of the state, as well as the margins of political power. Many of these minorities are not among the ‘recognized’ groups of the nation-states. These unrecognized borderzone groups are, in many cases—from Myanmar to Thailand to Malaysia—stateless. The second major ‘grouping’ of stateless individuals is pre-colonial migrants. These primarily include people from two groups: Muslims in Buddhist-majority states and Chinese migrants. Each requires contextualization. Islam had two distinct impacts in Southeast Asia. In mainland Southeast Asia, Islam remained secondary to Buddhism, and Muslim communities were usually officially tolerated, though often marginalized. In Myanmar, for example, Muslim immigrants were not allowed to fully integrate into the communities, and faced significant discrimination (Yegar, 2002). Discrimination continues into the modern day—the Rohingya are a clear example, and Patani Muslims in Thailand provide another. Conversely, the impact of Islam was much greater in maritime Southeast Asia, by which I mean contemporary Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, and the Philippines. This region was largely governed at a small-scale level, particularly due to challenging geographies: the widely dispersed nature of the islands led to the absence of any major singular power (Christie, 1996). Persian and Arab traders brought Mediterranean merchandise and introduced Islam into the maritime regions from the 9th century, expanding throughout the region over a number of centuries, including in many of the islands that make up present day Indonesia and Malaysia (Yegar, 2002). Contemporary Indonesia has the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, and Islam is given special provisions in the Constitutions of Malaysia and Singapore. For example, in the Malaysian Constitution, Islam is expressly made “the religion of the Federation” in Article 3.1, just after the boundaries of the Federation are established, and before the ‘Fundamental Liberties’ section, demonstrating its perceived importance in the eyes of the drafters. In light of this, the influx of Islam is critical to understanding the construction of ‘Malay-ness’, which would later become essential to being included in community membership. Today, certain clauses     10