Cold War Lives and Afterlives explores Cold War experiences and legacies in the critical borderlands of Northeast Thailand. Contextualizing her study within the international and national political environments, Vatthana Pholsena illuminates Cold War history on the ground through the lived experiences and agency of individuals from two ethnic minority groups in Nakhon Phanom province: Phuthai Communist Party of Thailand veterans and overseas Vietnamese involved in the Vietnamese revolution.

Drawing on sources in five languages and extensive field work, Pholsena demonstrates that present-day political identities in these regions are informed by a combination of new forms of citizenship and the contrasting ways in which individuals remember and publicly commemorate the conflicts of the Cold War. Cold War Lives and Afterlivesbrings together global and social history, foregrounding the plurality of historical experience. It offers critical insight into the relationships between migration, diaspora and revolution, political engagement and transnational mobilization, and war and nation-building.