The definitive account of the secret war in the tiny Southeast Asian nation of Laos, which lasted almost two decades and forever changed the CIA’s controversial role in foreign policy.
About the Expert
Expert Bio
Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is the author, most recently, of A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA. Kurlantzick was previously a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he studied Southeast Asian politics and economics and China's relations with Southeast Asia, including Chinese investment, aid, and diplomacy. Previously, he was a fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy. He is currently focused on China’s relations with Southeast Asia, and China’s approach to soft power, including state-backed media and information efforts and other components of soft power. He is also working on issues related to the rise of global populism and, particularly, populism in Asia.
Kurlantzick has also served as a columnist for Time, a correspondent for The Economist based in Bangkok, a special correspondent for the New Republic, a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. He also serves on the editorial board of Current History.
He is the winner of the Luce Scholarship for journalism in Asia and was selected as a finalist for the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism in Asia. His first book, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World, was nominated for CFR’s 2008 Arthur Ross Book Award. He is also the author of State Capitalism: How the Return of Statism is Transforming the World, and Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline in Representative Government.
Kurlantzick received his BA in political science from Haverford College.
Affiliations:
- Freedom House, contributor to Freedom in the World
- Pinter Politik, contributor
- World Politics Review, contributor
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A thought-provoking study of democratization proposing that the spate of retreating democracies, one after another over the past two decades, is not just a series of exceptions.