The (Transformative) Impacts of the Vietnam War and the Communist Revolution in a Border Region in Southeastern Laos

Abstract

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 conflicts 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.

Keywords:

• Sepon
• border region
• Pathet Lao
• Vietnam War
• mobilization
• state formation

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vatthana Pholsena

Vatthana Pholsena is a tenured researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris. Currently based in Singapore, where she is affiliated with the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University, she is also the representative in Singapore and Laos for the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC), Bangkok. She is the author of Post-War Laos: The Politics of Culture, History, and Identity (2006), Singapore-Ithaca: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies-Cornell University Press.