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This study examines terrorism’s evolution in South and Southeast Asia over the past two decades to decipher its trajectories in the era of great power competition. Specifically, it looks into terrorism’s evolution during two gamechanging events, the September 11, 2001 attacks and the 2012 Syrian conflict, and three episodic triggers of terrorism, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Taliban’s 2021 Afghan takeover and the 2023 Hamas-Israel Conflict. Despite losing eminence, terrorism has persisted and diversified in the past 20 years. Presently, religious terrorism, despite being weakened, co-exists with far right ethnonationalist terrorism as the fifth wave of terrorism crystallises. The examination of South and Southeast Asia’s threat landscapes reveals that global geopolitical developments have local consequences, and vice versa