Description
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.
Book Information
ISBN 9780299348601
Author Ryan Wolfson-Ford
Format Hardback
Page Count 344
Imprint University of Wisconsin Press
Publisher University of Wisconsin Press
Weight(grams) 454g