Maṇḍala is a Sanskrit word meaning 'circle'. The mandala is a model for describing the patterns of diffuse political power distributed among Mueang or Kedatuan (principalities) in medieval Southeast Asian history, when local power was more important than the central leadership. The concept of the mandala balances modern tendencies to look for unified political power, eg. the power of large kingdoms and nation states of later history – an inadvertent byproduct of 15th century advances in map-making technologies. In the words of O. W. Wolters who further explored the idea in 1982:The map of earlier Southeast Asia which evolved from the prehistoric networks of small settlements and reveals itself in historical records was a patchwork of often overlapping mandalas.

Kedatuan were historical semi-independent city-states or principalities throughout ancient Maritime Southeast Asia in the present-day Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. In a modern Indonesian/Malay sense, they could be described as kingdoms or polities. The earliest written record mentioning the term kadatuan was the 7th-century Srivijayan Telaga Batu and Kota Kapur inscription from Sumatra, Indonesia.