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Forsaken Causes

Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos
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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.
Ryan Wolfson-Ford is a Southeast Asia Reference Librarian at the Library of Congress.
List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 Origins of Democracy 2 Democracy in Practice 3 Origins of Anticommunism 4 Universal Democracy 5 Anticommunism and Nationalism 6 Democracy and Dictatorship 7 Anticommunism and Neutralism 8 Return of Democracy 9 Death of Democracy Conclusion: Specter of Democracy Notes Bibliography Index
"An important contribution to our understanding of Laos and anticommunism in Southeast Asia, and a needed correction to Cold War histories that tend to focus on the superpowers."-Christopher Goscha, author of The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam "Outstanding in its use of primary sources, Forsaken Causes emerges as a gauntlet thrown at non-Lao literate historians, challenging conventional assumptions about the events of the Cold War years. As someone who resided in Laos during a portion of these years, I cannot read this book without feelings of intense poignancy."-James R. Chamberlain
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