The Cold War is often depicted in binary terms: communists against anti-communists, the left against the right, or the free world versus the communist world. However, during the latter part of the Cold War, particularly following the 1979 war between China and Vietnam, earlier Cold War binaries no longer applied, and new alliances were established. These alliances often brought people with the same enemies together, despite having little in common ideologically. This article examines the historical circumstances and Cold War geographies of ethnic Khmu anti-Lao PDR and anti-Vietnamese insurgents, including their alliances with right-wing governments in Thailand and the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC). As neutralists, these Khmu occupied a political space rarely discussed in relation to the Cold War. Although the PRC provided training, weapons, and supplies to the neutralist Khmu between 1979 and 1983, later their political leader, General Kong Le, had a falling out with the Chinese, and the PRC stopped supporting his largely ethnic minority soldiers. However, up until 1989, the Thai government continued to allow the Khmu to maintain bases in Thailand for launching military operations inside Laos, until the Thai government adopted the “Battlefield to Marketplace” policy. Some Khmu continued resisting inside northwestern Laos during the early 1990s, but with declining numbers of soldiers and decreased outside support, armed resistance ended in 2003. It is critical that the geographies and alliances of the later Cold War be differentiated from those of the earlier years of the Cold War. This transnational insurgency deserves attention.

Revolutionary exports are essential to studying China’s relations with Southeast Asia during the Cold War, particularly regarding communist parties in neighbouring countries that received substantial logistical support from China, enabling them to sustain armed struggles. However, previous research has been limited due to the topic’s sensitivity and the scarcity of Chinese-language sources. This article seeks to uncover the logistical system centred on Mengla, Yunnan, designed to support Southeast Asian communist parties, mainly in Laos. By examining the development of Chinese logistics units and the extensive clandestine aid networks (including road construction) that linked China with Laos, this article argues that China’s integrated civil-military logistics support was pivotal in sustaining armed resistance in Southeast Asia and countering the influence of the United States in the region. Additionally, the article examines the dimensions of the Cold War in Asia from the perspective of the ordinary individuals who were direct participants.

Transnational marriage is a controversial topic in Hmong communities in the United States, Laos, and Thailand, and has sometimes led to intra-ethnic disputes and conflicts. Initially, many of the Hmong American men who travelled overseas to marry Hmong Lao or Thai women were already married. Furthermore, the Hmong American community has frequently come to believe that economic gain is the primary motivation for Hmong Lao/Thai women to marry Hmong American men. On the other hand, some activists have referred to these marriages generally as “abusive transnational marriages.” The association of economic resources with transnational marriage, including remittances, increased bride prices, and opportunities for migration to the United States, has perpetuated negative stereotypes that frequently overshadow the personal stories of many Hmong Lao/Thai women who do not fit with the stereotypes. For these women, marrying a Hmong American man signifies not only personal gain but also economic advancement for their families. This paper reviews the intricacies related to the topic of Hmong transnational marriage between Hmong American men and their Hmong Lao and Hmong Thai brides. In doing so, we argue that it is important to consider the complexity and nuances associated with Hmong transnational marriages, as they take on various forms that go beyond standard stereotypes.

During the Third Indochina War (1979-1991), the ideological alignments of involved parties differed from those during the Second Indochina War, also known as the Vietnam War. Whereas the Second Indochina War pitted communists squarely against non-communists and anti-communists, the Third Indochina War was more complicated and less ideological or political, with communists often fighting against other communists due to the Sino-Soviet ideological split. The enemy of one's enemy was frequently viewed as a friend, often leading to unlikely alliances not rooted in ideological or political similarities. In this article, I argue that it is important to consider the unlikely alliances that emerged during the Third Indochina War by focusing on the particular cross-border interactions and conflicts between communists and non-communists that occurred in the Emerald Triangle, the tri-border region between Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Focusing particularly on the Lao insurgent perspective, I consider how Lao anti-communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party of Thailand, other armed groups, and the Thai military participated in transnational collaboration in this region during the Third Indochina War. In particular, based largely on Lao-language interviews with key figures in the Lao insurgency conducted for over a decade, I examine how Lao insurgents interacted with Khmer Rouge to oppose a common enemy, communist Vietnam and their allies, the People's Republic of Kampuchea and the Lao People's Democratic Republic, and how the Thai military supported them, but only insofar as it enabled them to maintain control over security inside Thailand.

The ‘commons’ has acquired a renewed theoretical currency in recent years as a way of conceptualizing how different beings live together in shared places that are shaped and modified by human and non-human actions and structures. Through socioecological changes, warfare, movements of populations, sacralizations of land, political territorializations, and man-made infrastructures, the topography of any region, as a commons, is a process of perpetual transformation, invested by different flows and communities of humans. In this article, we will consider the positioning of the Lanten Yao (Mun) ethnic group within the Luang Namtha region in northern Laos. In the twentieth century, the Lanten Yao lived through the transformation of the commons into the territorialization and infrastructural building of colonial empires and nation-states, and negotiated the routes and boundaries between Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and China. Today, the land is once again being transformed through the Belt and Road Initiative, with the construction of Special Economic Zones, two ‘smart cities’, a high-speed railway, and a new speedway only a short distance from the Lanten villages. These new infrastructures are once again leading the Lanten to transform their relationships to their land, other peoples close and far, and distant states and administrations. In this article, we will explore how these shifting relationships to the commons are expressed in the rituals, sacred memories, and changing religious configurations among the Lanten Yao.

The article focuses on a comparative analysis of conflict and elite formation in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia; it argues that societal conflicts in Southeast Asia are grounded in the historical formation of elite social structures within differing sociocultures and that major and long-lasting societal conflicts—both violent and non-violent—occur in social spaces between ‘power elite’ groups. Additionally, it shows how up-and-coming elite groups are recruited from the fringes of the old hierarchy, which is why they are—in many respects—social hybrids of old and new sociocultures. Moreover, after those new arrivals were elevated into the ‘power elite’, the window for upward mobility rapidly re-closed.

Chinese state firms are expected not only to profit but also to serve state interests. But the Chinese state is fragmented: border provinces are taking on an expanded role in China's global expansion and a broad range of firm activities could be defined as patriotic contributions. Through the case of Yunnan State Farms (YSF), a province-level state-owned enterprise, this article explores how state firms interpret and navigate multiple state interests while also pursuing profit. The firm's ability to profit depends on balancing the demands and support of different Chinese state actors while depicting itself as a development partner to the Lao state and a contributor to Sino-Lao diplomatic relations and border region stability. This case thus shows that, instead of YSF's behaviour being directed by the state, the firm exercises considerable latitude in defining its contributions to state interests through the expansion of rubber production as a driver of development.

Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has intensified efforts to control the political life of the diaspora by recruiting proxies, or qiaoling 侨领, from the extraterritorial population for community-based governance. This paper examines the efficacy of this co-optive strategy by investigating its ramifications in Lao Chinese business communities. Following a group of qiaoling in Vientiane through qualitative fieldwork, I reveal how these individuals are self-motivated to perform patriotism by the desire to earn symbolic recognition. Their fame and prestige as qiaoling are critical for their material accumulation in the often-fraudulent business of intermediation for Chinese bureaucrats and investors. As such, while contributing to realigning the political allegiance of the diaspora, qiaoling simultaneously reshape the ongoing expansion of Chinese capitalism in ways that diverge from Beijing's developmental agenda. This finding complicates the long-held imaginary of an autonomous state–diaspora synergy in post-socialist China.

In recent years, transit routes in Vietnam for drug trafficking networks in the Southeast Asia region and beyond have expanded considerably. Many international scholars are working on identifying destination and transit routes of drug trafficking entities “to and through” Vietnam. Among these routes, the crossings through the Vietnam–Laos borderland of about 2,340 km are among the most severe concerns. This article analyses supply-and-demand scales of illicit drugs in Vietnam from 2008 to 2017 within the context of illegal drug trafficking in the mainland Southeast Asian region. Some evidence consistent with the “destination and transit route” arguments were found through mapping three main ways across the Vietnam–Laos borderland. The article also calls for enhancing the bilateral cooperation among law enforcement agencies to prevent and combat drug trafficking from the two sides.

This article bridges the traditionally segregated fields of Native American history and the history of American foreign relations by investigating a series of activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s that interconnected Native American development and American counterinsurgency agendas in the unstable political landscapes of Southeast Asia. A small coterie of American bureaucrats, with careers spanning foreign assistance and Native American development work, saw great potential in selectively showcasing Indian economic “success stories” to serve “hilltribe” development and counterinsurgency programs in Laos and Thailand sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Central Intelligence Agency. One result was a series of “intertribal” development tours arranged for Laotian and Thai representatives in multiple Native American communities in Arizona and New Mexico. Moreover, sharing a sense that Native Americans could offer unique advantages as direct development agents among other “tribes” overseas, the tours’ organizers garnered support from a diverse range of actors—CIA and USAID officials, Laotian and Thai military officers, and Indian political and business leaders—for launching a “tribe-to-tribe” foreign assistance program. Viewed together, these transnational schemes and discussions reveal how the flexible and multivalent meanings of key development concepts at the time—such as Indian achievement, tribal initiative, and “intertribal” understanding—both facilitated and constrained official designs to employ Native American models to support political and military agendas in the “shadow” theaters of the escalating Vietnam conflict.

The date and significance of the megalithic jar sites of central Laos are comparatively poorly understood features of the Southeast Asian archaeological landscape. First explored systematically in the 1930s, only limited research on these sites has been undertaken since. This article presents the recent excavations at Ban Ang—or site 1—a megalithic jar site of nearly 400 jars, located in Xieng Khouang Province. The results confirm the findings of earlier research, but additionally reveal a range of mortuary practices, high rates of infant and child mortality, and new evidence dating these interments to the ninth to thirteenth centuries AD.