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Conflict resolution theory and practice have often neglected the contributions of women in peacebuilding. To obtain a more balanced perspective, the work of women's movements, peace movements, and other social movements have attempted to highlight the importance of women's roles in society and their active participation in peacemaking activities throughout the world. This study hopes to contribute to recognizing gender in conflict resolution by examining the rituals of conflict resolution in Laos and the legacy of women working for peace. Through this gender lens, it highlights the importance of Lao women's work in the soukhouan ceremony, a conflict resolution ritual that is integral to Lao culture. The soukhouan ritual demonstrates characteristics that are vital to any peacebuilding effort, specifically how women are actively working to repair harm, restore relationships, and organize support networks that are essential for reconciliation in communities experiencing conflict. This research adds to conflict resolution literature that validates how women are playing a vital role in all stages of peacebuilding.

Increases in international tourism have been associated with increased livelihood opportunities and the creation of microenterprises in developing and less developed economies. An exploratory study examining the motivations for engaging in a microenterprise and the perceptions of the benefits of tourism was conducted with participants from Vientiane, Laos. It was found the microentrepreneurs in the study were mostly pushed into engaging in microenterprises due to the lack of employment opportunities and thus were creating their own jobs as opposed to being pulled into starting a business in search of wealth or lifestyle benefits. All participants of the study believed international tourism created more benefits than problems for both themselves and the country.

How rural libraries influence their communities’ development is shown in a number of studies, and many of those rural libraries have focused on their roles in increasing the accessibility of technology for their local community. However, few focused on how rural libraries are immersed in their surrounding natural environment to empower the community members’ learning about and with nature. Also, there have been rare examples of rural libraries that support not only their local community but also another country’s sustainable development. The Baramsup Picturebook Library, located in a rural area in South Korea, is an exemplary case because it has provided a large range of programming and services for diverse groups of people (i.e., from children to older adults) from diverse levels of communities – from the local communities around the library to the global communities of a developing country, Laos. Through qualitative content analysis of an interview with the library’s director as well as their official blog and articles and reports from magazines, this chapter presents a case study of this library. The library’s services and programs are demonstrated under three themes: (1) rural, local communities: cultivating the book culture; (2) local and regional communities: empowering children’s ecological sensitivity; (3) with global communities: building school libraries for children in Laos. This case study of the Baramsup Picturebook Library provides conceptual and practical insights into how rural and small libraries initiate changes in people and communities, thereby impacting sustainable social changes in larger communities.

Taking as its starting point the view that information literacy (IL) and information literacy education (ILE) are essential for national, social and personal development in countries of the less developed world, this chapter looks at how context informs our understanding of the nature and process of IL and ILE in developing countries of the Asian region, with particular attention to Cambodia and Laos. The principal focus is on definitional issues related to cultural contexts. From the literature and from personal experience as IL/ILE trainers in SE Asia, we maintain that extant definitions and understanding of IL are principally North American in origin and focus, or largely based on the North American perception of IL and ILE. It was not until the mid-years of the first decade of this century that we saw formal recognition that IL competencies are being applied within cultural and social contexts, and that cultural factors are affecting information literacy. Our chapter contributes ‘on-the-ground’ support for this understanding. During the course of a series of IL/ILE workshops in Cambodia and Laos, a series of ad hoc focus groups was utilised to test the contextual effects on understandings of information literacy; contextualised definitions, each specific to and slightly different for individual countries, were developed. What emerged from the focus group discussions about IL was a series of definitional nuances highlighting these key points: (1) information literacy in definition and practice must be contextually grounded; (2) knowledge creation as a product of information literacy is both knowledge based and problem focused; (3) the contexts of a society must be understood quite specifically; and may be unique to each society; and (4) information literacy involves a continuum that comes from and at the same time enables new learning related to the contextual aspects of information. Given these points, we confirm that traditional definitions of IL are not particularly robust in the context of less developed Asian countries. Further, we conclude that local understanding of IL results in definitions aligned with the realities of specific societies. This in our view leads to more robust, contextualised information literacy education.

The introduction of the 22 member countries of the 4+10+2+6 model of the Asian economy is the immediate task. Japan, Korea, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar constitute the now-famous 4+10 model. Following the principle of inclusion, Mongolia, Chinese Taipei, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka, as they belong to the regional map of the continent of Asia, are the eight remaining member countries (see Chapter 1). An overview of Asia's 22 member continental economy the AE-22, with its 3.6 billion people (2006) who have made the region of Asia their home in a land area of 20.5 million km² should be welcome. To put these figures in perspective, the AE-22 comprises only 13.7 percent of the world's land area, but is home to over half the world's population. Tables 2.1–2.4, presented below, illustrate the various figures relating to population, land area, GDP, and GDP per capita of the member nations of the AE-22.

In the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PRD), the services sector accounts for more than 41% of GDP and more than 80% of total trade (World Bank, 2021). Empirical studies show that most of the services trade occurs in the travel and tourism sectors, accounting for more than 50% of the total services trade in the Lao PDR. The services sector also plays an essential role in the Lao PDR’s wholesale and retail sectors, which employ the most significant number of people across all services sectors. The services trade balance was in a surplus between 1997 and 2011, though in 2012, it entered a significant deficit that continues to the present. This study investigates the link between services trade and economic growth in the Lao PDR, building on a recent analysis of the services trade in various economic and economic growth. The authors use econometric methods such as the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound test and the Granger causality test to analyze time-series data for the Lao PDR from 1990 to 2019. The econometric results demonstrate the long-run relationship between economic growth and variables related to the services trade. This indicates the government and policymakers of the Lao PDR should invest in infrastructure, particularly in trade facilitation and the liberalization of the services sector, to facilitate the acceleration of economic growth.

In this chapter, the authors use emerging works on geopolitical ecologies to analyze the relations between tourism and the transboundary haze disaster in northern Thailand. The region’s ‘smoky season’, which occurs between February and April of each year, has become a recurring seasonal haze disaster that is reported to be the combined result of biomass burning and urban air pollution. Drawing on ethnographic research among urban tourism practitioners, as well as a critical discourse analysis of popular and social media reports and commentaries, the authors argue that geopolitical discourses of transboundary haze production are shaped by tourists and the tourism industry in ways that perpetuate inequitably distributed disaster risk. Transboundary haze, the authors further contend, has become an ecological actor that co-produces discourses of escape among mobile tourists and residents. This research contributes to emerging work that conceptualises the geopolitical ecologies of transboundary environmental disasters in relation to tourism mobilities in southeast Asia.

This paper explores the political and legal issues contained in the law and jurisprudence surrounding missing American service personnel. It argues that the Missing Service Personnel Act of 1995 is an effect of the legacy of the Vietnam War rather than a response to a particular legal problem. The essay further contends that we should be suspicious of the effort to transform the balance sheet of war into a justiciable legal question, primarily because the requirement to produce a body fails to disarm the representational economy in which the absent body constitutes a continuation of Vietnam War hostilities.