front cover of Bomb Children
Bomb Children
Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos
Leah Zani
Duke University Press, 2019
Half a century after the CIA's Secret War in Laos—the largest bombing campaign in history—explosive remnants of war continue to be part of people's everyday lives. In Bomb Children Leah Zani offers a perceptive analysis of the long-term, often subtle, and unintended effects of massive air warfare. Zani traces the sociocultural impact of cluster submunitions—known in Laos as “bomb children”—through stories of explosives clearance technicians and others living and working in these old air strike zones. Zani presents her ethnography alongside poetry written in the field, crafting a startlingly beautiful analysis of state terror, authoritarian revival, rapid development, and ecological contamination. In so doing, she proposes that postwar zones are their own cultural and area studies, offering new ways to understand the parallel relationship between ongoing war violence and postwar revival.
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Dead in the Water
Global Lessons from the World Bank's Model Hydropower Project in Laos
Edited by Bruce Shoemaker and William Robichaud; foreword by Yos Santasombat; afterword by Philip Hirsch
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
For decades, large dam projects have been undertaken by both nations and international agencies with the aim of doing good: preventing floods, bringing electricity to rural populations, producing revenues for poor countries, and more. But time after time, the social, economic, and environmental costs have outweighed the benefits of the dams, sometimes to a disastrous degree. In this volume, a diverse group of experts—involved for years with the Nam Theun 2 dam in Laos—issue an urgent call for critical reassessment of the approach to, and rationale for, these kinds of large infrastructure projects in developing countries.

In the 2000s, as the World Bank was reeling from revelations of past hydropower failures, it nonetheless promoted the enormous Nam Theun 2 project. NT2, the Bank believed, offered a new, wiser model of dam development that would alleviate poverty, protect the environment, engage locally affected people in a transparent fashion, and stimulate political transformation. This was a tall order. For the first time, this book shows in detail why, despite assertions of success from the World Bank and other agencies involved in the project, the dam's true story has been one of substantial loss for affected villagers and the regional environment. Nam Theun 2 is an important case study that illustrates much broader problems of global development policy.
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Fields of Desire
Poverty and Policy in Laos
Holly High
National University of Singapore Press, 2014
In this important new book, High argues that poverty reduction policies are formulated and implemented in fields of desire. Drawing on psychoanalytic understandings of desire, she shows that such programs circulate around the question of what is lacking. Far from rational responses to measures of need, then, the politics of poverty are unconscious, culturally expressed, mutually contradictory, and sometimes contrary to self-interest.


Based on long-term fieldwork in a Lao village that has been the subject of multiple poverty reduction and development programs, High’s account looks at implementation on the ground. While these efforts were laudable in their aims of reducing poverty, they often failed to achieve their objectives. Local people received them with suspicion and disillusionment. Nevertheless, poverty reduction policies continued to be renewed by planners and even desired locally. High relates this to the force of aspirations among rural Lao, ambivalent understandings of power and the “post-rebellious” moment in contemporary Laos.
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Forsaken Causes
Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos
Ryan Wolfson-Ford
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
Postcolonial and post–World War II Southeast Asia churned with new political, social, and cultural realities and possibilities. Liberal democracies flourished briefly, only to be discarded in favor of dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes, as the disorder and slow response times inherent to democracy proved unsavory or unequal to the challenges of the Cold War. Uniquely, Laos maintained a stable democracy into the 1970s, but its history has often been flattened into the global tug-of-war between the superpowers.

Forsaken Causes offers the groundbreaking intellectual history of the Royal Lao Government (RLG) from 1945 to 1975. Ryan Wolfson-Ford’s account firmly centers the Lao people as not pawns of the superpowers but agents of their own history, with the Lao elite as the authors of the nation’s trajectory. The prevailing ideologies of liberal democracy and anticommunism were not imposed from the outside, as is usually assumed in Western accounts; rather, they were rooted in the specific culture of Laos, which prized its traditional monarchy, its Buddhist faith, and a powerful nationalistic concept of Lao race. Contrary to histories that dismiss the Lao elite as mere instruments of foreign powers, the RLG charted its own course during the Cold War, guided by complex motivations, rationales, and beliefs. By recentering the Lao in their own history, Wolfson-Ford restores our understanding of this robust, multiparty political system and enhances our understanding of postcolonial and Cold War Southeast Asia as a whole.
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Heritage and the Making of Political Legitimacy in Laos
The Past and Present of the Lao Nation
Phill Wilcox
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic is nearly fifty years old, and one of the few surviving one-party socialist states. Nearly five decades on from its revolutionary birth, the Lao population continues to build futures in and around a political landscape that maintains socialist rhetoric on one hand and capitalist economics on the other. Contemporary Lao politics is marked by the use of cultural heritage as a source of political legitimacy. Researched through long term detailed ethnography in the former royal capital of Luang Prabang, itself a UNESCO recognised World Heritage Site since 1995, this book takes a fresh look at issues of legitimacy, heritage and national identity for different members of the Lao population. It argues that the political system has become sufficiently embedded to avoid imminent risk of collapse but suggests that it is facing new challenges primarily in the form of rising Chinese influence in Laos.
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Hmong Means Free
Life in Laos and America
Sucheng Chan
Temple University Press, 1994

This collection of evocative personal testimonies by three generations of Hmong refugees is the first to describe their lives in Laos as slash-and-burn farmers, as refugees after a Communist government came to power in 1975, and as immigrants in the United States. Reflecting on the homes left behind, their narratives chronicle the difficulties of forging a new identity.

From Jou Yee Xiong's Life Story: 
"I stopped teaching my sons many of the Hmong ways because I felt my ancestors and I had suffered enough already. I thought that teaching my children the old ways would only place a burden on them."

From Ka Pao Xiong's (Jou Yee Xiong's son) Life Story: 
"It has been very difficult for us to adapt because we had no professions or trades and we suffered from culture shock. Here in America, both the husband and wife must work simultaneously to earn enough money to live on. Many of our children are ignorant of the Hmong way of life…. Even the old people are forgetting about their life in Laos, as they enjoy the prosperity and good life in America."

From Xang Mao Xiong's Life Story: 
"When the Communists took over Laos and General Vang Pao fled with his family, we, too, decided to leave. Not only my family, but thousands of Hmong tried to flee. I rented a car for thirty thousand Laotian dollars, and it took us to Nasu…. We felt compelled to leave because many of us had been connected to the CIA…. Thousands of Hmong were traveling on foot. Along the way, many of them were shot and killed by Communist soldiers. We witnessed a bloody massacre of civilians."

From Vue Vang's Life Story: 
"Life was so hard in the [Thai refugee] camp that when we found out we could go to the United States, we did not hesitate to grasp the chance. We knew that were we to remain in the camp, there would be no hope for a better future. We would not be able to offer our children anything better than a life of perpetual poverty and anguish."

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Industrialization in Late-Developing ASEAN Countries
Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam
Naoko Amakawa
National University of Singapore Press, 2010
Late industrializing countries are able to pick strategies for economic development based on the experiences of countries that preceded them. Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (the CLMV countries) were closed off from the international community for many years, and they began to embrace a market economy at around the same time. Each bypassed the import-substitution strategy adopted by other Southeast Asian countries and began industrialization efforts with export growth funded by Foreign Direct Investment.



The outcomes differed significantly owing to geographical location, government policies, and internal economic conditions. Industrialization in Late-Developing ASEAN Countries explores these differences through case studies based on an extended research program conducted by the Institute of Developing Economies in Tokyo, which offered insights into models of economic growth, and into the trajectories followed by the four countries examined.
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Modern Jungles
A Hmong Refugee’s Childhood Story of Survival
Pao Lor
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021
As a five-year-old boy, Pao Lor joined thousands of Hmong who fled for their lives through the jungles of Laos in the aftermath of war. After a difficult and perilous journey that neither of his parents survived, he reached the safety of Thailand, but the young refugee boy’s challenges were only just beginning.

Born in a small farming village, Pao was destined to be a Hmong clan leader, wedding negotiator, or shaman. But the course of his life changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the Hmong faced persecution for their role in helping US forces fighting communism in the region. After more than two years in Thai refugee camps, Pao and his surviving family members boarded the belly of an “iron eagle” bound for the United States, where he pictured a new life of comfort and happiness. Instead, Pao found himself navigating a frightening and unfamiliar world, adjusting to a string of new schools and living situations while struggling to fulfill the hopes his parents had once held for his future. Now in Modern Jungles, Pao Lor shares his inspiring coming-of-age tale about perseverance, grit, and hope. 

Included are discussion questions for use by book clubs, in classrooms, or around the dinner table.
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North Vietnam and the Pathet Lao
Partners in the Struggle for Laos
Paul F. Langer and Joseph J. Zasloff
Harvard University Press, 1970

Laos is a major arena of international confrontation despite the Geneva Accords of 1962. Yet there is a dearth of published material on Laos, and the crucial issue of North Vietnam's role in that country has hardly been examined. This important study illuminates the North Vietnamese-Pathet Lao partnership, an understanding of which is so critical to the search for peace in Indochina.

The authors reconstruct dispassionately the politics of the Lao revolution since its beginning after the Second World War. Focusing on North Vietnam's past and present role in Laos they trace the origins, evolution, organization, and leadership of the Pathet Lao organization. They demonstrate that the war in Laos is really three wars--Vietnamese traditional attempts to assert hegemony over regions of Laos important to North Vietnam's security; an extension of the struggle in South Vietnam; and a civil war between Lao Communists and anti-Communists. They show that Hanoi's active role springs from its interest in protecting its borders, gaining access to South Vietnam, and establishing a politically congenial regime in Laos. They conclude that the Viet Minh were a key factor in the genesis of the Pathet Lao and that the Vietnamese have continued to provide guidance and vital assistance to the revolutionary organization which now controls a significant portion of the country. On the other hand, the authors point out that the Pathet Lao share common interests with the North Vietnamese Communists and that, from their own perspective, they have not compromised their legitimacy as a nationalist movement by their heavy dependence on Hanoi.

Langer and Zasloff, experienced analysts of Southeast Asian affairs, conducted extensive field research in Laos. They interviewed a wide variety of persons with intimate knowledge of the Lao Communist movement, including former Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese military and civilian personnel. They talked with Lao, in and out of the Government, who had gone to school with their future Lao or Vietnamese adversaries, were linked to them by family ties, had been in the same political camp, or had confronted them at the conference table. They interviewed specialists on Laos and Vietnam, among them scholars, journalists, officials of international agencies, and foreign government officials. They examined a range of internal Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese documents diaries, letters, party directives, and training guides, as well as textbooks, newspapers, propaganda leaflets, and general literature. They studied Pathet Lao, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Chinese, and Soviet radio broadcasts and consulted printed materials about Laos from Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow.

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Prisoner of Wars
A Hmong Fighter Pilot's Story of Escaping Death and Confronting Life
Chia Youyee Vang
Temple University Press, 2021

Retired Captain Pao Yang was a Hmong airman trained by the U.S. Air Force and CIA to fly T-28D aircraft for the U.S. Secret War in Laos. However, his plane was shot down during a mission in June 1972. Yang survived, but enemy forces captured him and sent him to a POW camp in northeastern Laos. He remained imprisoned for four years after the United States withdrew from Vietnam because he fought on the American side of the war. 

Prisoner of Wars shows the impact the U.S Secret War in Laos had on Hmong combatants and their families. Chia Vang uses oral histories thatpoignantly recount Yang’s story and the deeply personal struggles his loved ones—who feared he had died—experienced in both Southeast Asia and the United States. As Yang eventually rebuilt his life in America, he grappled with issues of freedom and trauma.

Yang’s life provides a unique lens through which to better understand the lasting impact of the wars in Southeast Asia and the diverse journeys that migrants from Asia made over the last two centuries. Prisoner of Wars makes visible an aspect of the collateral damage that has been left out of dominant Vietnam War narratives.

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Voices from the Plain of Jars
Life under an Air War
Edited by Fred Branfman with essays and drawings by Laotian villagers; Foreword by Alfred W. McCoy
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
During the Vietnam War the United States government waged a massive, secret air war in neighboring Laos. Two million tons of bombs were dropped on one million people. Fred Branfman, an educational advisor living in Laos at the time, interviewed over 1,000 Laotian survivors. Shocked by what he heard and saw, he urged them to record their experiences in essays, poems, and pictures. Voices from the Plain of Jars was the result of that effort.
    When first published in 1972, this book was instrumental in exposing the bombing. In this expanded edition, Branfman follows the story forward in time, describing the hardships that Laotians faced after the war when they returned to find their farm fields littered with cluster munitions—explosives that continue to maim and kill today.
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