Laos and Cambodia

California is home to approximately one-third of the Cambodian American population, many of whom came to the United States as refugees. In a chapter from her book, Southeast Asian Migration: People on the Move in Search of Work, Refuge and Belonging, BIMI-affiliate and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies Khatharya Um, explores how Cambodian American youth participate in artistic expression and political engagement to navigate the burdens of transgenerational trauma and forced migration. Drawing on Prof. Um’s research, this policy brief makes recommendations for activists, educators, policy makers, and service providers to support the empowerment of young Cambodian Americans and other refugee communities.

On 23 July 2018, up to five million cubic meters of water plummeted from the reservoir of the Xe Pian Xe Namnoy dam, causing the biggest catastrophic event ever to occur in Laos related to a hydropower dam. But even before the dam broke it was already causing considerable social and environmental impacts, ones that constitute slow violence. Catastrophic and slow violence are, however, not simply separate entities. Rather, catastrophic violence can variously shift into becoming slow violence. This indicates the importance of temporality, and the need to be increasingly vigilant in addressing problems associated with certain types of projects.

Until very recently when rivers and streams were essential communication routes in Southeast Asia, the Mekong was the main one. Due to their nature, the Khone Falls (also called Li Phi, ຫຼີຜີ in Lao) form a natural obstacle to navigation and due to its location and topography, Khone Island has always formed the link between the lower and middle Mekong basins. Sometimes located in the middle of a political entity, but more often acting as a natural border between two political entities, the control of Khone Island has always been of strategic and commercial importance for them.
The purpose of this research is to determine what were the peoples, political and social entities of the region through the ages, their interrelationships and what represented the Khone Falls for them (strategic, commercial, religious, asset or obstacle, etc...) to trace the history of Khone Island and the region surrounding it through the ages.
Eventually, I plan to publish the results of this research, to produce a book in Lao for the inhabitants of Khône as well as information panels for tourists and fact sheets for tourist guides.

The vast majority of people living along the East West Economic Corridor (EWEC) are involved in the agricultural sector. A dependency on subsistence agriculture using traditional farming methods that rely on expensive pesticides has caused many households to be economically impoverished. Farmers often lack knowledge about alternative farming techniques that use less expensive inputs and farming techniques. At the same time, most households are unaware of markets beyond their immediate surroundings, and have little or no knowledge about broader national or international market opportunities. There is also a lack of pricing information, technologies, certification, branding, and linkages along the value chain for processing, packaging and marketing.

The value chain approach is an effective way to better understand the wider context of primary agricultural activities. Its application to organic vegetable production can help farmers connect to markets by showing how downstream linkages and different types of interventions can add value to their production activities.

This booklet provides a practitioner’s guide to the organic vegetables value chain, with particular emphasis on its application in the EWEC. It offers an integrated approach to what is now the fastest growing segment of agriculture, namely, organic vegetables. Its application to the EWEC can take advantage of the areas’ agricultural resource-based activities and the Corridor’s time and cost-effective way of moving products to markets.

This course is designed to introduce students to an array of places and peoples i n South-, Southeast-, and East-Asia, using a multidisciplinary lens. We will consider the making of Asian "nations" and "ethnicities." We will seek out interconnectivity and blurring between these groupings, as we study state apparatuses, migration, and histories. And we will probe seemingly mundane factors o f everyday life, such as food, music, and television. Our aim is to disrupt neat and nationalistic notions of "tradition," "culture," and "history." In exploring "modernization" and "development" in Asia, we aim to denaturalize and politicize these terms, and give attention to their stratified outcomes in terms of class, region, gender, religion, and ethnicity. We seek to question the "Asian Miracle," and better understand post-colonial, developmentalist, and neoliberal regimes as they impact everyday lives in Asia.

Book 2 of a Trilogy that traces the advent of Hinduism on South East Asian and Indo-Chinese countries. This part II deals with Cambodia and Indonesia and its architecture and Hindu temple construction and mysteries surrounding them and seeks to answer these

This is the first Book of a Trilogy that traces the growth of Hinduism in South East Asia. In this first Volume we focus our scope of Ancient India and how the South Indian Traders were able to convert the Cambodians and other nations to Hinduism. In the other two Books we will visit Cambodia and other South East Asian and Ind -Chinese countries to follow the growth of Hinduism there and the in the process built some of the most magnificent religious structures known to mankind.

A native of Bruges (now part of Belgium), Jacques de Coutre was a gem trader who spent nearly a decade in Southeast Asia in the early 17th century. In addition to a substantial autobiography written in Spanish and preserved in the National Library of Spain in Madrid, he wrote a series of memorials to the united crown of Spain and Portugal that contain recommendations designed to reverse the decline in the fortunes of the Iberian powers in Southeast Asia, particularly against the backdrop of early Dutch political and commercial penetration into the region. Translated into English for the first time, these materials provide a valuable first-hand account of the bigger issues confronting the early colonial powers in Southeast Asia, and deep insights into the societies De Coutre encountered in the territory that today makes up Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the borderlands between southern Laos, northeastern Thailand and northern Cambodia were a hotbed of militarized conflict and insurgent activity. Various armed groups, on the political left and right, operated in what was later referred to as the Emerald Triangle. This article considers how ethnic Kuy (Souay) Indigenous peoples from the Lao side of the border in Mounlapoumok District, Champasak Province, southern Laos, fled to neighboring parts of Ubon Ratchathani Province, northeastern Thailand as political refugees after Pathet Lao communists took over Laos in 1975. Many later became stateless insurgents fighting for Lao anticommunist groups opposed to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. In particular, the article considers the influence of political armed conflict on migration and citizenship status, and subsequently on agrobiodiversity
loss, particularly of native varieties of upland rice cultivated in swidden fields. This includes considering the structural violence associated with Thai government policies and practices related to forest conservation and preventing swidden cultivation. Agrobiodiversity loss was not centrally influenced by political violence, but it significantly influenced the conditions that affected agrobiodiversity, emphasizing the potential usefulness of studying political violence and agrobiodiversity loss through considering indirect influences.

In order to pave the way for the writing of a global history of Indochinese ports under colonial rule, a three-day international conference will be held October 26-28, 2022 at the University of Đà Nẵng in Việt Nam. By bringing together researchers from Việt Nam, France and beyond, this conference will aim to establish the current state of research on a question that remains largely unexplored. It will address the ports of the Indochinese Union (Việt Nam, Laos, Cambodia) in all their aspects (colonial and imperial, economic, social and cultural, military and strategic, etc.), at the crossroads of different historiographies, different disciplines, and with a comparative approach in mind. Moreover, the conference hopes to foster new perspectives on these singular spaces, situated in a land-sea continuum and whose trajectories of development did not end with the decolonization of French Indochina. At a time when the maritimization of the world continues to accelerate, and when exports are becoming a major lever of development for Southeast Asian economies (particularly for Việt Nam), a historical study of former colonial ports can provide useful insights into understanding current issues, whether in terms of port infrastructures, geostrategy, or regional economic development and positioning in the globalization of trade. Therefore, the debate will not be limited to the colonial period, even if this will constitute the core of the program; instead, the conference will endeavor both to introduce the region's pre-colonial port realities and to bridge the gap between the colonial and postcolonial by including port projects developed on the Vietnamese coastline after the country's independence.

Violent Neoliberalism explores the relationship between neoliberalism and violence through a critical poststructuralist perspective. Springer exposes the supposed humanitarianism of what has become the world's most dominant political economic model as a process of transformation that is shot through with a significant degree of cruelty. Employing a series of theoretical dialogues informed by the empirical experiences of development, discourse, and dispossession in contemporary Cambodia, Violent Neoliberalism engages as a diagnostic rupturing of commonsense to reveal the manifold ways in which ongoing patterns of neoliberalization have become engrossed with violence.

Over the last two decades, significant changes in lowland rice cultivation practices have occurred in mainland Southeast Asia. Here, we compare lowland rice farming in six provinces in northeastern Thailand and four districts in Savannakhet Province in southern Laos and consider the ways that agrarian change, including the deepening of capitalist relations, is occurring. Some of the most important changes taking place relate to increasing mechanization, remittances, changing bases of labour's simple reproduction, and the increased importance of international markets, especially for organic rice. These changes and associated government policies are having a considerable influence on agricultural practices. The Chinese market for organic rice from Laos is reducing pesticide and herbicides use and prolonging hand-transplanting of paddy, while encouraging farmers to use uniform sized high-yielding rice varieties, and abandoning local seeds. Rice exports from Laos are having both positive and negative environmental effects, indicating the nuanced influences of particular international markets and government policies.

A small yet influential strain of independent contemporary curatorial practice has emerged in Southeast Asia, which is performing (expanded) art historical functions. This mode of independent curating now constitutes an important base for exciting new research—making use of diverse archives as well as other methodologies—to study the often little-known histories of the region's modern arts, including its architecture, cinema, and photography. That such research is taking place in the context of independent contemporary curatorial practice is significant because it locates modern art history largely outside of large and state-funded institutions, including museums and universities, thus enabling the development and proliferation of art historical research in areas of Southeast Asia, including its mainland sub-regions, which have comparatively little funding and official infrastructure for the arts. This article explores the emerging practice of independent curating as (expanded) art history in Southeast Asia, through comparative discussion of three case studies: the Roung Kon Project in Phnom Penh, which researches histories of cinema in Cambodia; the Buddhist Archive of Photography in Luang Prabang, which researches histories of photography in Laos; and Spirit of Friendship in Ho Chi Minh City, which researches histories of artist groups in Vietnam.

The chapter argues that the post-1986 rapprochement between the Indochinese Communist states (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and ASEAN was considerably motivated and facilitated by economic considerations. Since the USSR was less and less able (or willing) to provide Vietnam and its satellites with as much aid as they wanted, Hanoi, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh became increasingly increased in broadening their economic relations with Thailand, Indonesia, and the other ASEAN states, not the least because they regarded ASEAN as a potential counterweight against China.

Recently concerns have been raised regarding the potential for the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) framework to recentralize forests, potentially setting back efforts to institute localized and decentralized forms of natural resource management. Here, I apply a political ecology approach to consider access and exclusion to land and natural resources in the contexts of three emerging REDD projects in Cambodia and Laos. I argue that each represents either a partial, incomplete, or so far unfulfilled—but nevertheless useful—example of efforts to use REDD to strengthen local resource tenure. Thus, it is possible to
envision how REDD could be utilized to leverage decentralized forest tenure, even if such a reality seems far away at present.

Plenty has been written about relations between Japan, China and South Korea with Southeast Asia, but there is far less examining North Korea and their relationship with this region. During the cold war North Korea interacted primarily with China, the USSR and other European countries behind the so called “Iron Curtain”. Following the collapse of communist countries in Europe, North Korea has had increasing dealings with Southeast Asia. This paper explores the topic of North-Korean Government operated restaurants in Southeast Asia. The restaurants are located in a number of countries in the region, including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. In the past there were also restaurants in Thailand and there are also a number of restaurants in China and several other countries outside of Southeast Asia. Why did they establish restaurants first in Siem Reap first rather than say Kuala Lumpur? Why did the North Korean government decide to open restaurants rather than attempt to make money another way and what purposes do they serve in addition to generating revenue?

There is a widespread view in the West that if the right institutions are put in place, democratic politics and free-market economics will follow. Yet history does not often bear this out. Laos and Cambodia provide case studies of how what undermines the intended functioning of political institutions has been the persistence of historically rooted political cultures. Understanding those political cultures goes some way to explaining not just the political inadequacies and economic failings of both countries, but also persistent resistance to transparent governance and spiralling corruption.

On December 6, 1904 the present international border between Laos and Cambodia was unilaterally established when the French colonial government extracted Stung Treng Province from Laos and transferred it to Cambodia. The ethnic Brao people living in the border region were not well known to the French, and in any case, their views were not deemed important. But since then the Brao have utilised this state administrative boundary in ways not intended by its designers, or governments since then, to give them more power to create new spaces. When conditions in Cambodia have been deemed unfavourable, the Brao have often crossed into Laos, and similarly, when circumstances have been less advantageous in Laos they have moved to Cambodia. This paper traces the history of the Brao as it specifically relates to the international border between Laos and Cambodia. While this administrative boundary was created to help national governments keep populations confined within nation-states, Brao human agency has sometimes confounded these efforts, through transforming its significance and role. The boundary has separated Brao populations in ways that are sometimes upsetting to them, but it has also allowed the Brao to position themselves at the margins of different nation-states, in spaces where they have been able to, at least temporarily, avoid or reduce state control over them. These are not non-state spaces; they are fundamentally constituted by a state-established boundary, even if the Brao have been able to mobilise this resource to empower themselves, and sometimes to resist the state itself.

Jusqu’à une époque très récente où les rivières et les fleuves étaient des voies de communication essentielles en Asie du Sud-Est, le Mékong était la principale d’entre-elles. Du fait de leur nature, les chutes de Khône (ou également appelées Li Phi, ຫຼີຜີ en Lao) forment un obstacle naturel à la navigation et du fait de son emplacement ainsi que sa topographie, l’île de Khône a toujours formé le trait-d’union entre les bassins du bas et du moyen Mékong. Parfois située au milieu d’une entité politique, mais le plus souvent faisant office de frontière naturelle entre deux entités politiques, le contrôle de l’île de Khône a toujours été d’une importance stratégique et commerciale pour celles-ci.
Le but de ces recherches est de déterminer quels étaient les peuples, entités politiques et sociales de la région au travers des âges, leurs interrelations et que représentaient les chutes de Khône pour eux (importance stratégique, commerciale, religieuse, atout ou obstacle, etc…) afin de retracer l’histoire de l’île Khône et de la région qui l’entoure au travers des âges.
À terme, je projette de publier les résultats de ces recherches, de réaliser un livre en lao pour les habitants de Khône ainsi que des panneaux d’informations à destination des touristes et des fiches pour les guides touristiques.

Over the last decade considerable research has been conducted on the development and the impacts of large-scale economic land concessions for plantations in Laos and Cambodia. These studies have variously illustrated that concessions frequently result in serious negative impacts on local people and the environment, often leading to dramatic transformations of landscapes and livelihoods. As important as this research has been, these studies have largely focused on the immediate impacts of the “enclosure” process associated with gaining access to land by investors. In this study we take a different approach, investigating the implications of large-scale land concessions in southern Laos and northeastern Cambodia with regard to places outside of actual concession areas, both within the countries where the concessions are located and beyond. These links have been referred to as “teleconnections” or “telecoupling”, and adopting a “telecoupling” approach allows us to focus on particular relations between land-use change in one location and land-use change elsewhere, either nearby or distant, as the result of large-scale plantation development, both during the early plantation development period, and later when plantations are productive. It also provides opportunities to engage with Land Change Science (LCS) through Political Ecology (PE).

During the Vietnam War, American planes dropped more bombs on Cambodia than had fallen in all of Europe during World War II. The event marks a key moment in the secretive expansion of U.S. military power, and this article looks at how mainstream journalism helped create the discursive conditions that abetted this expansion. After an explication of the historical and theoretical rationales for studying the relation between journalism and U.S. military power, this article analyzes Time magazine's coverage of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 and finds that the American press at the time was not discursively configured to critique the U.S. military-diplomatic apparatus. The article analyzes the depiction of Cambodia as a theater of war and argues that most critiques of the bombing were limited to President Richard Nixon's quality of character, providing a locus that prevented more systemic critiques from emerging.

The first English translation of author George Groslier's 2,000 km Mekong River journeys to inspect Buddhist pagodas in 1929 French Indochina. The renowned artist, writer and historian was the quintessential witness to colonial Cambodia. This new fully illustrated edition includes supplemental appendices and the complete original French text.

There is a long history of Theravada Buddhist monk involvement in promoting militarism along the present-day Laos-Thailand border. Here, I examine relatively recent Lao monk support for political and military activities directed against the communist Lao People‘s Democratic Republic government and their Vietnamese supporters since 1975. Some monks have assisted rebel groups as refugees in Thailand. Monks have not become directly involved in armed conflict, as monastic rules do not allow participation in offensive violent acts, or arms trading, but they have played various important roles in supporting armed resistance against the Lao government. Some monks who have been actively involved in assisting rebels have been shot in Thailand. Now most of the Lao rebel-supporting monks live in the USA, Canada and France, where a few continue to assist the political resistance against the Lao government, arguing that providing such support does not contradict Buddhist teachings. This article demonstrates how Lao political refugee Buddhist monks have variously negotiated religious conduct rules in the context of strong nationalistic convictions.

This article gives the Sanskrit Text and Translation of K. 1320, a tenth-century edict of the Khmer king Īśānavarman II about the annual taxes to be paid by Liṅgapura (Vat Phu). (The article is preceded, in the volume in which it appears, by an introductory essay by Claude Jacques.)

In January 2013, the discovery of a beautifully engraved and perfectly preserved four-sided stela at Vat Phu was announced in the press (Vientiane Times, 15th January). This stela proved to be a document produced at the behest of a Khmer monarch about whom not much else is known called Īśānavarman II, probably in 926 AD, his first regnal year. It is not only a major new source for the history of Vat Phu, testifying once again to the centrality of this Śaiva site in the religious landscape of the Khmers, but also a unique source for information about taxation in kind in the Angkorian period.  Because the Khmer empire made almost no use of coinage at any point in its history, the list of items constituting the taxes here makes colourful reading.

"Wars and their aftermaths frequently transform land use and ownership, reshaping ‘post-conflict’ landscapes through new boundaries, population movements, land reforms and conditions of access. Within a global context of controversial land concessions and farmland acquisitions, we bring to light the continued salience of historical memories of war in the ways land conflicts are being negotiated in Laos. Considering circumstances at different scalesdfrom bilateral government relations to village-level claimsdwe find that political capital linked to memories of wartime affiliations have crucial spatial and place-based connections, and that they affect the ways investors, government officials and villagers negotiate over land concessions. Ethnographic evidence, spatial analysis and a survey of expatriate development workers engaged with land issues in Laos suggest that such ‘political memories’ are an important but often overlooked factor in shaping an uneven concessions landscape. We discuss implications for foreign development organizations that tend to privilege technical and legal aspects of land
management over such political dimensions."

"Phnom Penh's Independence Monument and Vientiane's Patuxai: Complex Symbols of Postcolonial Nationhood in Cold War-Era Southeast Asia," by Roger Nelson. In "Monument Culture: International Perspectives on the Future of Monuments in a Changing World," edited by Laura A. Macaluso (London: Rowman & Littlefield), 35-48.

We have before us a very readable perspective on early modem regional history that does not express the central Thai point- of-view, but rather that of the peripheral Lao. In the context of prevailing historiography, this is an important contribution, and helps enrich our overall picture of developments during the period and in the place under examination. It also helps to put the state-centered historical narrative of Victor Lieberman into a broader perspective. That is, by looking at this period through the eyes of one of the many small- and mid-sized kingdoms that lost out to the expanding Burmese, Thai, and Vietnamese core states (and the Lao kingdoms were in the unique position of being pressured and diced up by not just one, but all three), we can better understand and sometimes even question processes viewed as core-prompted in the Liebermanian model. Looking at migration, for example, the authors suggest how dislocation caused by the expansive Thai state led to migration into Laos that strengthened (and did not weaken) both Lao unity and the economic prosperity of the Lao kingdom (p. 44).
Books such as the one under review, which suddenly draw attention to a range of developments and perspectives that have as yet made no appearance in the prevailing historiography, appear only once in a few years. There will probably be better books down the road on this period and place, in terms of balance and broader connections, but this book's contributions lie elsewhere, in both innovation and impact, and will not likely or easily be surpassed.This book is highly recommended for both scholars and students of Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, and especially Lao history.This book is also an example to historians of Cambodia about what could be done with the historical sources for the hazy late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Over the last decade, there have been considerable concerns raised regarding the social and environmental impacts of large-scale land concessions for plantation development in various parts of the world, especially in the tropics, including in Laos and Cambodia. However, there is still much to learn about the various connections and interactions associated with reactions to what are often referred to as “land grabs”, and the ways they are associated or not associated with broader social movements and networks opposed to land grabbing. There is also the need to develop language for discussing these circumstances, something I aim to contribute to in this article. Here, I present four different cases of types of resistance, or what I refer to as contingent contestations, to land concessions in southern Laos and northeastern Cambodia (two from each country), focusing on the perspectives and associated strategies of smallholder farmers, but without ignoring broader issues. I consider the roles of locals in these contestations, through emphasizing the importance of histories, identities/ethnicities, politics, and geography in determining the types of responses to these land deals that emerge, and the strategies that are adopted for contesting these developments.

La Plaine de Vientiane. Etude socio-économique. Royaume du Laos (1959), Commissariat au Plan (Vientiane), Bureau pour le Développement de la Production Agricole (Paris). Rapport de mission, octobre 1959. Carte hors-texte inédite : Carte administrative de la plaine de Vientiane, échelle 1:100 000e ~ Avec une nouvelle introduction de Georges Condominas, ce livre inédit, qui a été longtemps et abondamment pillé sous sa forme initiale de rapport multigraphié, reprend l’essentiel des données collectées en 1959 par cet ethnologue qui allait bientôt devenir célèbre et un ingénieur agronome (INA Paris-Grignon) à la demande du Bureau pour le Développement de la Production Agricole (Paris) et du Commissariat au Plan du Laos.
André Leroi-Gourhan, anthropologue, professeur au Collège de France, souhaitait cette publication et regrettait déjà en 1970 que le rapport de Condominas et Gaudillot sur la plaine de Vientiane n’ait fait l’objet que d’une polycopie à l’issue de l’enquête « car c’est une des sources les plus utiles pour l’ethnographie laotienne ». Il voyait ce travail comme une somme d’informations très appréciable sur l’organisation foncière, l’organisation et le rôle du bouddhisme, et l’organisation administrative traditionnelle au Laos. La Plaine de Vientiane est en effet une introduction idéale au Laos (géographie, histoire, ethnologie, économie, démographie, agronomie) pour qui souhaite une première approche de ce pays. Il peut grandement aider un visiteur profane à découvrir ce pays ou à prolonger sa découverte à l’issue du voyage. Par sa richesse informative et son ampleur de vue, cet ouvrage est depuis sa rédaction un document de référence sur le milieu laotien naturel et humain, l’histoire et les activités socio-économiques de ce pays. L’intérêt de La Plaine de Vientiane est grand non seulement pour la très large mise en perspective de la société pluri-ethnique du Laos, dans ses dimensions spatiale et temporelle, pour ce que l’ouvrage nous apprend sur la sociologie, les aspects religieux et politiques de la vie villageoise de cette région du Laos, ou pour ce qu’il nous fait découvrir de l’agriculture laotienne, de ses manques et de ses perspectives, mais aussi pour ses remarques et critiques de fond à propos de développement économique et de coopération. Le texte de La Plaine de Vientiane n’a pas vieilli et demeure d’actualité. Il présente un intérêt certain pour cette région du monde et pour cette époque-clé qu’est la fin de la décennie 1950, alors – faut-il le rappeler ? – que les dramatiques échos de la guerre d’Indochine résonnaient encore, annonçant la guerre du Vietnam.