Forsaken Causes

In the wake of anticolonial struggles and amid the two world wars twentieth-century Southeast Asia churned with new political cultural and intellectual realities. Liberal democracies flourished briefly only to be discarded for dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes as the disorder and inefficiencies inherent to democracy appeared unequal to postcolonial and Cold War challenges. Uniquely within the region Laos maintained a stable democracy until 1975 surviving wars coups and revolutions. But Lao history during this period has often been flattened subsumed within the tug-of-war between the global superpowers and their puppets.<br> <br> <i>Forsaken Causes</i> offers a groundbreaking intellectual history of the Royal Lao Government (RLG) from 1945 to 1975. In Ryan Wolfson-Ford's account the Lao people emerge as not merely pawns of the superpowers but agents in their own right with the Lao elite wielding particular influence over the nation's trajectory. Their prevailing ideologies-liberal democracy and anticommunism-were not imposed from outside but rather established by Lao themselves in the fight against French colonialism. These ideologies were rooted in Lao culture which prized its traditional monarchy Buddhist faith French learning and nationalist conception of a Lao race. Against histories that have dismissed Lao elites as instruments of foreign powers Wolfson-Ford shows that the RLG charted its own course guided by complex motivations rationales and beliefs. During this time Lao enjoyed unprecedented democratic freedoms many of which have not been seen since the government fell to communist takeover in 1975.<br> <br> By recentering the Lao in their own history Wolfson-Ford restores our understanding of this robust but often forgotten liberal democracy recovers lost voices and broadens our understanding of postcolonial and Cold War Southeast Asia as a whole.