Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Laos

Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Laos provides a comprehensive introduction to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic’s recent development and transformation.

The handbook showcases state-of-the-field interdisciplinary research across six themes: The Basics, The Populace, Political Economy, Resources, International and Challenges. Individual chapters provide specialist and non-specialist readers with a rigorous overview of 32 fundamental topics in Lao Studies, from ‘The Party: Lao People’s Revolutionary Party’, ‘Inter-Ethnic Relations’ and ‘Decision Making’, to ‘Land’, ‘Lao Foreign Policy’ and ‘Gender.’ Marking the 50th anniversary of the country’s landmark revolution of 1975, the handbook explores the contested achievements of socialist rule under the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP), examines the political, economic and environmental impact of the LPRP’s resource intensive strategies for growth and development, and considers the benefits and challenges of Laos’s evolving geo-political and geo-economic relations with China, Vietnam, Thailand and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). While focusing on contemporary Laos, the chapters are rooted in a clear understanding of how present-day issues have emerged from Laos’s extraordinary history, spanning pre-colonial Buddhist kingdoms, French colonialism, royalist nationalism and socialist revolution.

Bringing together a purposely diverse collection of scholars, each an established or emerging authority in their own sub-field, the timely study takes stock of the country’s development and considers what the next phase in the country’s history might hold.

Simon Creak is a historian of Laos and Southeast Asia and Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research focuses on the history and politics of nationalism, regionalism, socialism, sport and Cold War Asia. Besides his research on Laos, Simon has published widely on sport, nationalism and regional diplomacy in Southeast Asia. He is author of Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (2015), co-author of the Historical Dictionary of Laos, Fourth Edition (2023) and is currently writing a cultural and political history of the Southeast Asian Games (SEA Games), the region’s premier sports event, since the 1950s.

Holly High is an anthropologist, does fieldwork in Laos and uses ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis to understand human experience. She was trained at Australian National University, and has held postdoctoral positions or fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, Sydney and Deakin Universities. Holly has written about anthropological approaches to debt, power and desire; psychoanalytic theory and anthropology; Lao policy (including cultural, poverty, health and agricultural policies) in relation to lived experience in that country; everyday politics in Laos; and religion in Laos. Currently, Holly is investigating transformations in pregnancy, birth and early childhood in Laos.

Oliver Tappe is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Cologne. His work is located at the interstices between social anthropology and history, with a particular focus on mainland Southeast Asia. In his most recently concluded research project (at the University of Heidelberg, funded by the German Research Foundation), Oliver investigated labour relations, livelihood transformations and sociocultural change in the tin mining area of Khammouane province (central Laos). In his current project—in cooperation with Vanina Bouté (EHESS Paris)—he shifts his focus towards longstanding Chinese communities in northern Laos, their local cultural practices, social networks and perceptions of the new Laos-China dynamics. Tappe has published on different issues such as Lao PDR historiography, socio-political dynamics in the Laos-Vietnam borderlands, historical patterns of labour mobility, and local ethnohistory.