Post-war Laos

Post-war Laos PDF Author: Vatthana Pholsena
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801473203
Category : Ethnicity
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
Three decades after the conclusion of the civil war that brought the communist Pathet Lao to power, the leaders of the Lao People's Democratic Republic are still searching for a compelling and unifying national identity. As detailed in Postwar Laos--a rigorously researched, cogently argued, and pathbreaking book--Laotian nationalism is caught between the rhetoric of preservation and the desire for modernity. Using fine-grained analysis of substantial ethnographic and archival material, Vatthana Pholsena sheds light on the politics of identity, the geographies of memory, and the power of historical narrative in contemporary Laos.Pholsena pays particular attention to the country's ethnic minorities, who had been marginalized--politically, administratively, and symbolically--by the French colonial government, which ruled for fifty years, and by its Royal Lao successor. Many members of these minorities fought for the Lao People's Liberation Army in the country's civil war (1960-1975), though, and were thus exposed to the processes of modern politics. The first book to examine the impact of such forces on Laos's ethnic minorities and their perception of Laotian nationalism, Postwar Laos also refines established theories of nationalism. Pholsena addresses a weakness common to all: the tendency to deny agency to individuals, who may in fact interpret their relationship to, and place within, the nation in a variety of ways that change according to time and circumstance.Postwar Laos offers a new perspective on the history of Southeast Asia and, more broadly, on the formation of national identity that will be welcomed by historians, political scientists, sociologists, ethnographers, and cultural anthropologists alike.

Post-war Laos

Post-war Laos PDF Author: Vatthana Pholsena
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801473203
Category : Ethnicity
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
Three decades after the conclusion of the civil war that brought the communist Pathet Lao to power, the leaders of the Lao People's Democratic Republic are still searching for a compelling and unifying national identity. As detailed in Postwar Laos--a rigorously researched, cogently argued, and pathbreaking book--Laotian nationalism is caught between the rhetoric of preservation and the desire for modernity. Using fine-grained analysis of substantial ethnographic and archival material, Vatthana Pholsena sheds light on the politics of identity, the geographies of memory, and the power of historical narrative in contemporary Laos.Pholsena pays particular attention to the country's ethnic minorities, who had been marginalized--politically, administratively, and symbolically--by the French colonial government, which ruled for fifty years, and by its Royal Lao successor. Many members of these minorities fought for the Lao People's Liberation Army in the country's civil war (1960-1975), though, and were thus exposed to the processes of modern politics. The first book to examine the impact of such forces on Laos's ethnic minorities and their perception of Laotian nationalism, Postwar Laos also refines established theories of nationalism. Pholsena addresses a weakness common to all: the tendency to deny agency to individuals, who may in fact interpret their relationship to, and place within, the nation in a variety of ways that change according to time and circumstance.Postwar Laos offers a new perspective on the history of Southeast Asia and, more broadly, on the formation of national identity that will be welcomed by historians, political scientists, sociologists, ethnographers, and cultural anthropologists alike.

A Great Place to Have a War

A Great Place to Have a War PDF Author: Joshua Kurlantzick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451667892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book

Book Description
The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.

Interactions with a Violent Past

Interactions with a Violent Past PDF Author: Sina Emde
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 9971697017
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book

Book Description
The Second and Third Indochina Wars are the subject of important ongoing scholarship, but there has been little research on the lasting impact of wartime violence on local societies and populations, in Vietnam as well as in Laos and Cambodia. Today's Lao, Vietnamese and Cambodian landscapes bear the imprint of competing violent ideologies and their perilous material manifestations. From battlefields and massively bombed terrain to reeducation camps and resettled villages, the past lingers on in the physical environment. The nine essays in this volume discuss post-conflict landscapes as contested spaces imbued with memory-work conveying differing interpretations of the recent past, expressed through material (even, monumental) objects, ritual performances, and oral narratives (or silences). While Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese landscapes are filled with tenacious traces of a violent past, creating an unsolicited and malevolent sense of place among their inhabitants, they can in turn be transformed by actions of resilient and resourceful local communities.

Strike Patterns

Strike Patterns PDF Author: Leah Zani
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781503611733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
A vivid meditation on the aftermath of war and the infinite registers of loss and repair

Eternal Harvest

Eternal Harvest PDF Author: Karen Coates
Publisher: ThingsAsian Press
ISBN: 1934159492
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book

Book Description
Karen Coates and Jerry Redfern spent more than seven years traveling in Laos, talking to farmers, scrap-metal hunters, people who make and use tools from UXO, people who hunt for death beneath the earth and render it harmless. With their words and photographs, they reveal the beauty of Laos, the strength of Laotians, and the commitment of bomb-disposal teams. People take precedence in this account, which is deeply personal without ever becoming a polemic.

Bomb Children

Bomb Children PDF Author: Leah Zani
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478005262
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Changing Lives in Laos

Changing Lives in Laos PDF Author: Vanina Bouté
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 981472226X
Category : Forced migration
Languages : en
Pages : 473

Get Book

Book Description
Changes in the character of the political regime in Laos after 2000, a massive influx of foreign investment, and disruptions to rural life arising from improved communications and new forms of mobility within and across the borders have produced a major transformation. Alongside these changes, a group of young scholars carried out studies that document the rise of a new social, cultural and economic order. The contributions to this volume draw on original fieldwork materials and unpublished sources, and provide fresh analyses of topics ranging from the structures of power to the politics of territoriality and new forms of sociability in emerging urban spaces.

Deep Tears

Deep Tears PDF Author: Gayle L Morrison
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
From 1961-75, the US Central Intelligence Agency trained, armed, and supported Hmong General Vang Pao's guerrilla soldiers in the fight against communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army troops during the "secret war" in Laos. When the US abruptly withdrew from Vietnam and neighboring Laos in the spring of 1975, victorious communist regimes took control of both countries. In Laos, US-allied Hmong soon faced reprisals from their former enemies. This is not history as seen from 30,000 feet above. It is not theory, nor is it abstract. The speakers give critical insight into why the anti-communist resistance was so widely supported by Hmong in Laos, Thailand, and the US in the 1980s-and why it did not succeed. Using oral history narratives from 101 survivors, Gayle Morrison uncovers and weaves together first-hand accounts from the Hmong perspective of the horror facing more than 100,000 people who fled from their villages into the jungles. There they banded together for protection by creating multiple armed resistance areas. Their raw, compelling portrayals draw the reader into the intimate details of a brutal time in Hmong history when half of those who fled died from military attacks, disease, starvation, chemical poisoning, drowning, or imprisonment. Sometimes resembling dark fiction, this is the terrible reality of what can happen to allies left behind in the wake of an American military withdrawal.

Tragic Mountains

Tragic Mountains PDF Author: Jane Hamilton-Merritt
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253207562
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 632

Get Book

Book Description
Tragic Mountains tells the story of the Hmong's struggle for freedom and survival in Laos from 1942 through 1992. During those years, most Hmong sided with the French against the Japanese and Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh, and then with the Americans against the North Viemamese.

Shooting at the Moon

Shooting at the Moon PDF Author: Roger Warner
Publisher: Steerforth Italia
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book

Book Description
In Shooting at the Moon, Roger Warner chronicles a covert operation that used Hmong villagers as guerrilla fighters against the North during the Vietnamese War. Thought to be an expendable resource by Central Intelligence Agency strategists, the Hmong died by the thousands fighting the North Vietnamese. Those who survived were abandoned to their fate when the United States pulled out of the war. Warner's history is the moving and tragic story of how America's 'secret war' devastated its own allies in Southeast Asia.