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Conclusion 169 169 9 Conclusion Fieldnotes from the Postrevolution The previous chapters were primarily based on fieldwork conducted in 2002–03. I kept a post-box in Pakse during that time, and once a month or so I would travel in to town to pick up the newspapers and mail that were delivered to it. Throughout 2003 a slow drip of violent incidents were reported in the papers: a bomb attack on the Pakse to Vientiane bus left one dead and 20 injured; a “group of unidentified gunmen shot at and threw a grenade into duty free shops on the Nam Ngeun Lao-Thai border checkpoint in Sayaboury province, on July 12” wounding a child (Vientiane Times 2003: July 15–17); The Vientiane Times dated 5–7 August reported a bomb attack “yesterday” at the morning market in Vientiane, with ten injured. There were six such incidents between February and August, with over 30 casualties (Thayer 2004: 111). It was difficult to know what to make of these: were they related? Were they political? The Lao government claimed that they were unrelated incidents undertaken by criminals. However, on 12 July, Lao Citizens Movement for Democracy (LCMD) announced that they had initiated a “revolution” to overthrow the “oppressive Communist government” (Thayer 2004: 111). In the same year, a sensational Time Magazine photo essay reported on Hmong resistance groups: a rag-tag army estimated at approximately 3,000, apparently living and fighting in desperate conditions. However, most commentators at the time concluded that these attacks and resistance groups were not a serious threat to the LPRP regime. The Economist reported, for instance, that: TO READ what little news emerges from secretive Laos, you would think one of the world’s last communist regimes was on the verge of collapse…. Mysterious assailants have been launching attacks on highways all over the 170 Fields of Desire country. A long-forgotten insurgency is making headlines again. A bomb exploded last month in the centre of the capital, Vientiane. Laotian exiles in America have announced the beginning of a revolution. The contrast with recent years, when relative calm propelled foreign aid and tourism to record highs, is stark—and, it turns out, misleading (Economist 2003, capitalization in original). Thayer (2004), in summing up 2003 in Laos, captured the mood in four words “Counterrevolution fails to ignite”. It is true that from my position on Don Khiaw, the violence seemed distant and unlikely to spark a wider uprising . Indeed, my study of everyday politics in the south of Laos, conducted during this time of remarkable unrest, seemed at its conclusion to have been a study ultimately of political quietude. This could be thought of as a post-rebellious moment for Don Khiaw, or as Baird and Le Billon (2012) have suggested, a “post-conflict” one. The basis for political and economic influence in Don Khiaw has been successively eroded: the decline of mandala polities and the rise of the nation state system has seen this region shift from being close to the centre of a political universe to being literally at its margins. The shift from riverine polities to national highway networks has made this once centrally-located and prosperous place obscure and poor. This region—historically westward leaning—found itself on the wrong side of the 1975 revolution. More recently, globalization has meant that poverty is now experienced in relative terms, and relative to a global system of steep inequality. In Chapter Three I described how the new nation’s border sliced through the region and consolidated over time so that today, the border and the regime of citizenship that it enforces is one of the most profound causes of the poverty. Early forms of resistance took the form of flight and fight, both of which depended on travels across that western border. However, the southern insurgency, which so many people had willingly joined, been caught up in or affected by, petered out in the 1990s. New technical aspects of the state such as taxation, land titling and citizenship papers were being progressively rolled out while I was there. Disgruntlement with the regime remained strong, but this was now expressed with a resignation and quietude maintained under sometimes extraordinary conditions. The lesson, as summed up by one returned insurgent and quoted in Chapter Three, was: These days it doesn’t matter—we don’t resist them now. We don’t evade their policies. If we evade their policies, they’ll arrest us for sure. But we...

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