Papers by Vatthana Pholsena
, qui a financièrement soutenu nos recherches. Ce livre est dédié à Roong, Rujikorn et Ruthira. C... more , qui a financièrement soutenu nos recherches. Ce livre est dédié à Roong, Rujikorn et Ruthira. Ce programme de recherche a été lancé par Stéphane Dovert.
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific r... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. War Generation: Youth Mobilization and Socialization in Revolutionary Laos Vatthana Pholsena
Memory Studies, 2024
This article explores the life of an event—a massacre during the First Indochina War on 21 March ... more This article explores the life of an event—a massacre during the First Indochina War on 21 March 1946 in Thakhek, Laos—in the border town of Nakhon Phanom in northeastern Thailand, to where most of the survivors fled. Ignored by Thai authorities and not memorialized in social practices, this event nevertheless continues to have significant impacts on local communities. This article draws on two key concepts: Paul Ricoeur’s “mnemonic act” and Avery Gordon’s notion of “haunting.” Ricoeur’s “small miracle” of memory and Gordon’s haunting as a way of awakening
consciousness to past violence help to elucidate the meanings of events for the present, namely, the traces that they leave. Following Valentina Napolitano’s definition of “trace,” this article shows how the memory of the event of 21 March 1946 has become anchored in different sites in Nakhon Phanom and how the event has acquired different meanings, its life prolonged through divergent processes of (re)interpretation and narrativization in each of these sites.
Critical Asian Studies, 2024
Hundreds of combatants and civilians, both Lao and Vietnamese, perished in the small border town ... more Hundreds of combatants and civilians, both Lao and Vietnamese, perished in the small border town of Thakhek in central Laos on March 21, 1946, when French forces launched their biggest military operation in Indochina at the time. The French victory over the revolutionary forces that day paved the way for the colonial reconquest of Laos and energized France’s military campaign for the reoccupation of Indochina, yet it is barely mentioned in the historiography of the First Indochina War (1945-1954). Drawing on French archives, Lao and Vietnamese documents, and interviews with survivors, this article reconstitutes the history of this massacre and suggests that the massacre has not been fully investigated by historians for two reasons. First, the story of the killing of these hundreds of people – mostly ethnic Vietnamese residing in Laos – sits uneasily between studies of the contemporary history of Laos and academic work on the war between France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, thus falling into a historiographical gap. Second, the battle was marked by compromise and miscalculation, which has prevented it from attaining the status of a great anti-colonial battle in the history of the struggle for Lao and Vietnamese independence.
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European Journal of East Asian Studies, 2010
The study of war has changed dramatically over the last few decades, moving from a focus on class... more The study of war has changed dramatically over the last few decades, moving from a focus on classical military history to interdisciplinary reflections on societies at war and the combatant's experience of battlefield violence. No one text or one school of thought can explain this shift. Nor is it our aim here to do so. However, given that this collection of essays seeks to explore the socio-cultural dimensions of the experience of war in Indochina 1 and China in the twentieth century, it is important to situate our work within this larger historiography. It has certainly been of inspiration to us and has opened up new and fruitful avenues of research and points of comparison. We also hope that by connecting our work to this wider body of international research, we can contribute modestly to bringing Asia into the wider picture both empirically and conceptually. This seems important in light of the relative paucity of studies on the socio-cultural experiences of war in Asia compared to those on the West. This despite the fact that some of the most destructive conflicts of the twentieth century occurred in Asia: the Russo-Japanese, the Sino-Japanese, the Korean and Indochina wars.
Critical Asian Studies, 2021
This article analyzes two key frontlines during the Cold War, border
areas in the provinces of Sa... more This article analyzes two key frontlines during the Cold War, border
areas in the provinces of Savannakhet (central Laos) and Nakhon
Phanom (northeastern Thailand), adjacent to the Lao-Vietnamese
and Thai-Lao borders, respectively. We investigate the distinct
transformative experiences of war and revolution on members of
the same ethnic minority – the Phutai – in both locations. The
wartime trajectories of these populations diverged significantly,
partly because their territories experienced very different pre-
Cold War histories. As a consequence, Phutai in Thailand moved
through homogeneous ethnic space between Thailand and Laos.
In contrast, the Phutai in Laos, hemmed in by political,
topographic, and ethnic boundaries, contributed to the building
of a communist proto-state. The Phutai were confronted by
different communist projects, which also shaped their distinct
revolutionary experiences: the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT)
boosted ethnic minorities’ resistance against the Thai state’s
nationalist ideology, while the Lao revolutionary movement
facilitated ethnic minorities’ social mobility within the Pathet Lao
apparatus. Whether through confrontation in Thailand or
accommodation in Laos, Phutai in both locations played active
roles in the multi-layered history of the region.
The article can be downloaded via this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/2NXAM4UUQV56BWKPJW7I/full?target=10.1080/14672715.2021.1872391
Ethnic and Racial Studies
Click on this link to have free access to the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/G3YxNcB... more Click on this link to have free access to the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/G3YxNcB3WTVMAMcK9EMH/full
Research on coexistence and urban diversity (notably in the United Kingdom,
Australia, Malaysia and Singapore) has demonstrated the ways individuals of
diverse backgrounds routinely manage differences and interact meaningfully
in multicultural societies, drawing on shared cultural knowledge and habits.
This paper argues for a deeper exploration of societies where intercultural
know-how is more limited and the capacity to negotiate difference has not
been inculcated. This description fits several Southeast Asian societies wherein
the politics of majority-minority is a dominant feature. This article investigates
the possibilities of familiarity and friendship in a multiethnic town in southern
Laos where the predominant ideology towards cultural diversity has been one
of assimilation. In doing so, the paper reveals ways of creating a sense of
belonging and community other than the practices of cultural
accommodation. These processes draw on competences and dispositions
which individuals have acquired through their mobility, producing a sense of
togetherness, albeit contingent and fragmented.
State formation below the national scale remains under-researched. In this article, the reconstit... more State formation below the national scale remains under-researched. In this article, the reconstitution of the local history of an upland region of Laos – Sepon – reveals a process of state formation from a territorial margin. Contrary to James C. Scott’s thesis on state-evading peoples, members of a local ethnic minority population – the Phuthai – have been part of the making of the state over centuries. In addition to the material aspects of state-making, this article explores its intangible components that are often neglected in analyses of state formation. This wider lens is particularly applied to the Communist state making efforts in Sepon during the American- Vietnam War. These have had the unintended consequence of producing a new class that replicates age-old social hierarchies and have resulted in Sepon, and probably other upland areas of contemporary Laos, being more socially inequitable than the Communist Revolution intended.
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This article is an investigation in the longue durée of the uneven transformation of a 'borderles... more This article is an investigation in the longue durée of the uneven transformation of a 'borderless land' into a 'state space' in the course of one of the most violent confl icts in the contemporary history of Southeast Asia. It focuses on a strategically important area along the Lao-Vietnamese border that was captured by communist forces in the early 1960s and targeted by intense US bombing. I argue that the process of state-making in this border region relied on two exceptional conditions: warfare and the dominance of a modern political organization, i.e. the Communist Party, able to mobilize and organize local populations by capitalizing on extreme social and material conditions. Mobilization in this context involving bombing and displacement of populations was a social process as much as a military tactic, which aimed to legitimise new political authority and structures in a space that had never known such a direct form of control.
This article draws on fieldwork carried out between and in the rural district of Sepon,... more This article draws on fieldwork carried out between and in the rural district of Sepon, located in the east of Savannakhet Province in southern Laos. The area was heavily bombed by U.S. forces between and in an attempt to stop North Vietnamese supplies flowing into South Vietnam from the North via the transportation network widely known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The district of Sepon constituted a strategic centre and logistics base area for the North Vietnamese Army, and was one of the most important nodes on the Trail. This paper represents an attempt to reconstruct life under aerial bombardment through the recollections of some survivors. The majority of recollections concerned aspects of day-today survival, including the most routine tasks of daily life that, under bombardment, became major challenges. However, some survivors dwelt on more profound issues, notably their remembrance of the period as a 'Dark Age' characterized by a loss of their humanity. Silences—untold or absent memories—are also present in the villagers' accounts, which we view not as an obstacle to the telling of their stories, but as an integral constituent of their recollections.
This paper reviews a crucial period in Lao history, the early years of the revolution between 194... more This paper reviews a crucial period in Lao history, the early years of the revolution between 1945 and 1949, with a special focus on the hinterland areas of southeastern Laos. Along with the professional historians' reconstituted past, two other analytically different approaches to the narration of this period are discussed: the myth-making narration as found in a recently published Lao history book, and the narrative as remembered by a war veteran who was directly involved in the events.
Nommer pour contrôler au Laos, de l'État colonial au régime communiste par Vatthana Pholsena de p... more Nommer pour contrôler au Laos, de l'État colonial au régime communiste par Vatthana Pholsena de puis 1975, le Parti révolutionnaire populaire lao monopolise le pouvoir au Laos, grâce notamment à l'appui solide de ses deux plus proches alliés politiques, la Chine et le Vietnam. Ce pays de l'Asie du Sud-Est occupe une superficie de 236 800 km 2 et abrite une population approchant les six millions d'individus (la densité est d'à peu près 25 habitants par km 2 ). Son faible poids démographique n'empêche pas une grande diversité linguistique et culturelle. L'ethnie Lao, dominante sur le plan politique, représente environ la moitié de la population. Jusqu'en 2007, le Laos a recensé officiellement 47 groupes ethniques. Cette année-là, le gouvernement entérine le nombre de 49 ethnies proposé par le Front lao pour la construction nationale (FLCN), principale organisation de masse gouvernementale, sur la base des recherches qu'il a entreprises dès 1999. Cette liste n'est toutefois approuvée que tardivement par l'Assemblée nationale, en novembre 2008. Nous présenterons dans une première partie les divers recensements ethniques entrepris par les régimes qui ont précédé la République démocratique populaire du Laos (RDPL), c'est-à-dire l'État colonial français, puis le Royaume indépendant du Laos. Dans une seconde partie, nous exposerons les motivations et les pratiques politiques et idéologiques qui guident la classification ethnique 60 -Critique internationale n o 45 -octobre-décembre 2009 dans le Laos de l'après-guerre 1 . Les dirigeants communistes laotiens ont en effet affiché leur volonté de rompre avec la politique et la classification ethniques pratiquées par le gouvernement royal, qui, par certains aspects, prolongeaient celles mises en place par l'administration coloniale 2 .
In this article, I analyse ethnic classi cations in contemporary Laos, starting with a brief revi... more In this article, I analyse ethnic classi cations in contemporary Laos, starting with a brief review of previous policies. I rst look at the ideologies that have in uenced the Lao ethnic classi cation, namely those of the former Soviet Union, China and Vietnam. Through an analysis of the construction of the latest of cial census (August 2000), I suggest a close relationship between ethnic categorisation and the government's nationalist discourse, still strongly in uenced by guidelines on the concept of the nation disseminated by Kaysone Phomvihane—the rst President of the Lao PDR, now deceased but celebrated at present in Laos as the inspirational gure of the regime. My intention is thus to demonstrate how one technology of power in particular—the Lao population census based on ethnic criteria—attempts to map the nation's 'invisible' ethnicity through a dual process, namely the objecti cation of the Other ethnic groups' arbitrarily de ned cultural features on the one hand, and the erasure of the dominant ethnic group's ethnicity (the ethnicity of the ethnic Lao) on the other. But this technology of power is limited, as the names and the lists of ethnic groups have remained subject to alteration every few years. Twenty years after Kaysone Phomvihane urged for a change in ethnic terminology and classi cation, the regime has yet to legitimise de nitively the total number of ethnic groups in the Lao PDR.
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Papers by Vatthana Pholsena
consciousness to past violence help to elucidate the meanings of events for the present, namely, the traces that they leave. Following Valentina Napolitano’s definition of “trace,” this article shows how the memory of the event of 21 March 1946 has become anchored in different sites in Nakhon Phanom and how the event has acquired different meanings, its life prolonged through divergent processes of (re)interpretation and narrativization in each of these sites.
Click on this link to have free access to the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6ZCFI9AMSNV6H9RNYSEF/full?target=10.1080/14672715.2023.2295917
areas in the provinces of Savannakhet (central Laos) and Nakhon
Phanom (northeastern Thailand), adjacent to the Lao-Vietnamese
and Thai-Lao borders, respectively. We investigate the distinct
transformative experiences of war and revolution on members of
the same ethnic minority – the Phutai – in both locations. The
wartime trajectories of these populations diverged significantly,
partly because their territories experienced very different pre-
Cold War histories. As a consequence, Phutai in Thailand moved
through homogeneous ethnic space between Thailand and Laos.
In contrast, the Phutai in Laos, hemmed in by political,
topographic, and ethnic boundaries, contributed to the building
of a communist proto-state. The Phutai were confronted by
different communist projects, which also shaped their distinct
revolutionary experiences: the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT)
boosted ethnic minorities’ resistance against the Thai state’s
nationalist ideology, while the Lao revolutionary movement
facilitated ethnic minorities’ social mobility within the Pathet Lao
apparatus. Whether through confrontation in Thailand or
accommodation in Laos, Phutai in both locations played active
roles in the multi-layered history of the region.
The article can be downloaded via this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/2NXAM4UUQV56BWKPJW7I/full?target=10.1080/14672715.2021.1872391
Research on coexistence and urban diversity (notably in the United Kingdom,
Australia, Malaysia and Singapore) has demonstrated the ways individuals of
diverse backgrounds routinely manage differences and interact meaningfully
in multicultural societies, drawing on shared cultural knowledge and habits.
This paper argues for a deeper exploration of societies where intercultural
know-how is more limited and the capacity to negotiate difference has not
been inculcated. This description fits several Southeast Asian societies wherein
the politics of majority-minority is a dominant feature. This article investigates
the possibilities of familiarity and friendship in a multiethnic town in southern
Laos where the predominant ideology towards cultural diversity has been one
of assimilation. In doing so, the paper reveals ways of creating a sense of
belonging and community other than the practices of cultural
accommodation. These processes draw on competences and dispositions
which individuals have acquired through their mobility, producing a sense of
togetherness, albeit contingent and fragmented.
Click on this link to have free access to the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cJjfKpyneKKxnQQUDj7q/full
consciousness to past violence help to elucidate the meanings of events for the present, namely, the traces that they leave. Following Valentina Napolitano’s definition of “trace,” this article shows how the memory of the event of 21 March 1946 has become anchored in different sites in Nakhon Phanom and how the event has acquired different meanings, its life prolonged through divergent processes of (re)interpretation and narrativization in each of these sites.
Click on this link to have free access to the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6ZCFI9AMSNV6H9RNYSEF/full?target=10.1080/14672715.2023.2295917
areas in the provinces of Savannakhet (central Laos) and Nakhon
Phanom (northeastern Thailand), adjacent to the Lao-Vietnamese
and Thai-Lao borders, respectively. We investigate the distinct
transformative experiences of war and revolution on members of
the same ethnic minority – the Phutai – in both locations. The
wartime trajectories of these populations diverged significantly,
partly because their territories experienced very different pre-
Cold War histories. As a consequence, Phutai in Thailand moved
through homogeneous ethnic space between Thailand and Laos.
In contrast, the Phutai in Laos, hemmed in by political,
topographic, and ethnic boundaries, contributed to the building
of a communist proto-state. The Phutai were confronted by
different communist projects, which also shaped their distinct
revolutionary experiences: the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT)
boosted ethnic minorities’ resistance against the Thai state’s
nationalist ideology, while the Lao revolutionary movement
facilitated ethnic minorities’ social mobility within the Pathet Lao
apparatus. Whether through confrontation in Thailand or
accommodation in Laos, Phutai in both locations played active
roles in the multi-layered history of the region.
The article can be downloaded via this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/2NXAM4UUQV56BWKPJW7I/full?target=10.1080/14672715.2021.1872391
Research on coexistence and urban diversity (notably in the United Kingdom,
Australia, Malaysia and Singapore) has demonstrated the ways individuals of
diverse backgrounds routinely manage differences and interact meaningfully
in multicultural societies, drawing on shared cultural knowledge and habits.
This paper argues for a deeper exploration of societies where intercultural
know-how is more limited and the capacity to negotiate difference has not
been inculcated. This description fits several Southeast Asian societies wherein
the politics of majority-minority is a dominant feature. This article investigates
the possibilities of familiarity and friendship in a multiethnic town in southern
Laos where the predominant ideology towards cultural diversity has been one
of assimilation. In doing so, the paper reveals ways of creating a sense of
belonging and community other than the practices of cultural
accommodation. These processes draw on competences and dispositions
which individuals have acquired through their mobility, producing a sense of
togetherness, albeit contingent and fragmented.
Click on this link to have free access to the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cJjfKpyneKKxnQQUDj7q/full
Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, this book provides insights into the ideology of nationalism and ethnicity in contemporary Laos. It examines how the current Lao regime has attempted to construct a legitimizing nationalist discourse by imposing its own cultural preferences and interpretations of the country’s past. This analysis is interwoven with a study of the politics of identity, the geographies of memory and the power of narratives with respect to certain members of ethnic minority groups who fought during the Vietnam War in the Lao People's Liberation Army and/or were educated within the revolutionary administration. No study has ever been conducted on such individuals’ views on the nationalist project of the post-socialist era. Their own perceptions of their membership of the nation have been overlooked.
Post-War Laos refines established theories of nationalism, such as Anderson's imagined community, by addressing a common weakness: namely, their tendency to deny agency to individuals, who in fact interpret their relationship to, and place within, the nation in a variety of ways that may change according to time and circumstance.
1. Introduction
Vanina Bouté and Vatthana Pholsena
PART I: STATE FORMATION AND POLITICAL LEGITIMATION
2. The History and Evolution of the Lao People’s
Revolutionary Party
Martin Rathie
3. Shaping the National Topography: The Party-State,
National Imageries, and Questions of Political Authority
in Lao PDR
Oliver Tappe
4. ‘Special Operation Pagoda’: Buddhism, Covert Operations
and the Politics of Religious Subversion in Cold-War Laos
(1957–60)
Patrice Ladwig
5. War Generation: Youth Mobilization and Socialization
in Revolutionary Laos
Vatthana Pholsena
6. Socialist Pathways of Education: The Lao in East Germany
Nicole Reichert
PART II: NATURAL RESOURCE GOVERNANCE AND
AGRARIAN CHANGE
7. The Political Ecology of Upland/Lowland Relationships
in Laos since 1975
Ian G. Baird and Olivier Évrard
8. The New ‘New Battlefield’: Capitalizing Security
in Laos’s Agribusiness Landscape
Michael B. Dwyer
9. Reaching the Cities: New Forms of Network and
Social Differentiation in Northern Laos
Vanina Bouté
PART III: ETHNIC MINORITIES ENGAGING WITH MODERNITY
10. Ethnic Belonging in Laos: A Politico-Historical Perspective
Grégoire Schlemmer
11. Piglets Are Buffaloes: Buddhification and the Reduction
of Sacrifices on the Boloven Plateau
Guido Sprenger
12. Rubber’s Affective Economies: Seeding a Social Landscape
in Northwest Laos
Chris Lyttleton and Yunxia Li
PART IV: IN SEARCH OF OPPORTUNITIES: MOVING ACROSS AND OUTSIDE THE COUNTRY
13. Migration and Mobility in Laos
Sverre Molland
14. Patterns and Consequences of Undocumented Migration
from Lao PDR to Thailand
Kabmanivanh Phouxay
15. Textiles Economy in Laos: From the Household to
the World
Annabel Vallard
Dans cet ouvrage, huit spécialistes du Laos, en sciences sociales et en sciences politiques, analysent à partir d’enquêtes de terrain inédites et centrées sur les mutations actuelles, les défis et les contradictions que ce pays – longtemps fermé à la recherche – doit surmonter à l’ère de la mondialisation. Il ne s’agit pas seulement ici du premier ouvrage en langue française à aborder de telles questions pour le Laos contemporain, mais aussi d’une contribution originale à la connaissance de l’évolution actuelle d’un Parti-État qui se dit encore communiste, bien que déjà largement « post-socialiste », permettant la comparaison avec la Chine ou le Viêt-Nam voisins.