I’m spending a lot of time right now understanding Laos’ fairly quick descent into militarized polarization during the early Cold War, which occurred much faster than in Cambodia. This is not a case I knew anything about prior to starting the work, so it’s been a really rewarding and interesting experience to hit something genuinely new.
Below are a few books I’ve found useful (with deep debts to the H-Diplo roundtable review of Seth Jacobs’ The Universe Unraveling as a guide):
Christopher E. Goscha and Karine Laplante, eds., L’échec de La Paix En Indochine/The Failure of Peace in Indochina: 1954-1962 (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2010)
Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos (Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
MacAlister Brown and Joseph Jermiah Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries: The Communist Movement in Laos, 1930-1985 (Hoover Institution Press, 1986)
William J. Rust, Before the Quagmire: American Intervention in Laos, 1954-1961 (Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 2012)
Nicholas Tarling, Britain and the Neutralisation of Laos (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011)
Martin Stuart-Fox, Buddhist Kingdom, Marxist State: The Making of Modern Laos, 1st ed, Studies in Southeast Asian History, no. 2 (Bangkok ; Cheney: White Lotus, 1996)
Arthur J. Dommen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization, Rev. ed (New York: Praeger, 1971)
Søren Ivarsson, Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space between Indochina and Siam, 1860-1945, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series 112 (Copenhagen S, Denmark: NIAS Press, 2008)
Jacob Van Staaveren, Interdiction in Southern Laos, 1960-1968: The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia (Washington, D.C: Center for Air Force History : For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O, 1993)
Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Vatthana Pholsena, Post-War Laos: The Politics of Culture, History, and Identity (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2006)
William J. Rust, So Much to Lose: John F. Kennedy and American Policy in Laos, Studies in Conflict, Diplomacy, and Peace (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2014)
Seth Jacobs, The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos, Illustrated edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012)
Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
Charles A. Stevenson, The End of Nowhere: American Policy toward Laos since 1954 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972)
Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975, First Edition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000)
Ryan Wolfson-Ford, Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
Paul Staniland 
Paul, if you haven’t already, I highly recommend using Edwin Moise’s Vietnam War bibliography with an extensive selection on Laos. He has compiled works produced by a wide variety of authors and sources, and includes all aspects of the war there. Separate pages exist for air and special operations in/over Laos and the role of the State Department.
I used this bibliography extensively when writing my senior college thesis on Laos. My focus was on all US activities (economic, diplomatic, military, paramilitary) in Laos from 1960-1964. I wanted to specifically flesh out US decision-making under Eisenhower and the transition to Kennedy and then provide an on-ground point of view of their respective policies using various accounts. My argument on why the US became involved and stayed involved in Laos: US policymakers would not sacrifice US prestige, and by extension their own, in losing Laos to communism. A similar argument could be made about South Vietnam, but the difference between the wars in Laos and Vietnam was the diplomatic layer. Laos was supposed to be “neutral” through the Geneva Accords of 1954 and 1962. Neither the US nor the North Vietnamese recognized this, and both fought on in Laos in silent agreement to maintain the covert nature of that part of the war in Indochina.
So, in reality, American prestige was maintained through diplomatically neutralizing Laos for the public, while also running an extensive covert war there to fight the Communists. The latter lent credibility within the US executive branch that we were “doing something” against the Communists while publicly maintaining the former neutral diplomatic approach. Lots of layers to this topic and finding your post here this week has really gotten me back into it again.
Here is the link to the bibliography: https://edmoise.sites.clemson.edu/laos.html
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