Over recent decades a number of states in South and Southeast Asia have been troubled by armed separatist movements that have sought to create their own independent polity via physical separation from the parent state. Various forms of autonomy have been promoted by policy-makers and donors as the most democratic way of accommodating separatist insurgents in ethnically, religiously, politically and socially divided states. Despite this, remarkably few states in Asia have succeeded in winning over their aggrieved eparatist minorities to the dominant nationalist cause.