In the period since the end of the Cold War (c. 1991), there has been an upsurge in the number of states around the world that define themselves as ‘democracies’. So too this has been the case in Southeast Asia, if incomplete in some areas and with reversals in others. This is in part due to the turn towards electoral processes in formerly authoritarian client states that have since lost the patronage of one or other of the two then superpowers.
