This collected volume of 15 chapters is an invaluable contribution to the small but growing field of Lao Studies, and essential for understanding Laos’ contemporary political-economic, sociocultural, and environmental transformations. The book is divided into four sections — I) State formation and political legitimation, II) Natural resource governance and agrarian change, III) Ethnic minorities engaging with modernity, and IV) In search of opportunities: Moving across and outside the country — each helpfully beginning with a broad overview followed by two to four chapters on more specific topics. Changing lives in Laos covers a diverse range of content, including the evolution of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP, the Party) and its use of national imagery and memorials to bolster state authority (chaps. 2 and 3), the political mobilisation of Buddhism and youth groups before and during the Second Indochina War (chaps. 4 and 5), the political ecological relationships of upland and lowland areas (chap. 7), the emergence of new agribusiness enclosures in the countryside (chap. 8), the changing spiritual and economic practices of ethnic minorities (chaps. 11 and 12), and labour out-migration to Thailand (chap. 14).

As a whole, the book captures the complex transformations that have transpired in Laos, showing how significantly scholarship has advanced since the most recent English-language collected volume on the country was published in 1999: Laos: Culture and society, edited by the late Grant Evans. The chapters in Changing lives in Laos demonstrate that the rapid and extensive political-economic, social, and environmental developments in Laos over the past two decades require us to re-think common understandings and tropes about the country. For example, they implore the reader to consider the complexities and contradictions of the Lao state and Party, which has remained socialist but has also reinvented itself more than once to maintain its popular legitimacy during times of crisis (Part I). Similarly, the book upends images of rural Laos as remote, bucolic, and static or a relic of pre-modern Asia. The authors show how rural areas of the country have been dramatically disrupted by war, multiple waves of coerced and voluntary resettlement, and new forms of agribusiness plantations (chaps. 7, 8). Similarly, rural people are no longer staying put, but increasingly migrating to cities and small towns, thus demonstrating that Laos can no longer be considered an exclusively rural country (chap. 9). Chapters in Part III complicate stable categorisations of ethnic minorities in Laos, showing how their identities and practices are flexible and dynamic, responding in complex ways to the modern political-economic and social currents shaping their lives. In Part IV as well as Chap. 6, the authors show the Lao population to be anything but remote and disconnected from the world. Instead, Lao people have been and are increasingly becoming internationally mobile, connected, and cosmopolitan, through old and new forms of education, migration, and trade abroad.

Thus, the edited volume presents a sophisticated image of contemporary Laos, which is astutely interpreted by the editors in the introduction via three main themes that run through the chapters: i) the ‘paradoxical state’, ii) mobility as a tool of governance, mobility as a means of livelihood, and iii) old ties, new ties. The introduction, however, could have further elaborated upon these themes to present a clearer overarching picture of contemporary Laos. The key terms in the title — changing lives, society, politics and culture, and the post-socialist state — for the most part remain undefined and un-theorised. For example, while the editors do stake out their conceptual approach to the state, they do not address the intriguing yet controversial notion that Laos is a ‘post-socialist’ state. It is commonly assumed that Laos is post-socialist because, like China and Vietnam, it has enacted economic reforms that have facilitated the expansion of capitalist social relations and regimes of accumulation. Unlike former socialist republics of Eastern Europe, however, the political structure in Laos has largely remained intact, and it is the state that in fact remains the most socialist element of the country today. The legacies of socialism even endure in the economic realm, such as the state's dominant role in managing land and the joint ownership it often takes in major infrastructure projects.

Developing a more robust and conceptually rich introduction would serve as a guide to the next generation of scholars of Laos. Toward that end, the introduction could have considered the topics that did not make it into the book, but which demand further scholarship and should be featured in the next edited volume on Laos (ideally published in less than two decades’ time!). These would include the increasing presence of Chinese and Vietnamese investors, traders, and migrant labourers, the ramifications of relentless hydropower development, the unique experiences of urban life in Laos, the uncertain future of a nascent Lao civil society, and the meanings and practices of political activism, particularly in relation to social media. These are the themes that could stand up to and build upon the immense contribution that Changing Lives in Laos has made to the increasingly vigorous field of Lao Studies.