In Southeast Asian statecraft, sovereignty radiated outward from a sacred centre rather than stopping at a border: the capital was built as a mandala, a scale model of Mount Meru and the cosmos, with the god-king (devaraja) at the axis. Concentric enclosures, moats standing for the cosmic ocean, cardinal gates and a central temple-mountain replicated the universe so that ordering the city was itself an act of ordering the realm. Outlying centres reproduced the same diagram at smaller scale, and allegiance faded with distance, producing overlapping and shifting spheres rather than fixed territory. Tambiah named this the 'galactic polity' in 1977 and Geertz described the resulting 'theatre state' in Negara (1980), where ritual display was the substance of government, not its decoration.
It supplies the explanatory logic for Southeast Asia's greatest urban ensembles, showing why Angkor, Bagan and the Javanese kratons invested overwhelmingly in cosmological geometry and hydraulic ritual landscapes rather than in defended frontiers. The model also reframed political geography generally, offering an influential alternative to the bounded, homogeneous territory assumed by European state and planning theory.
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