tage of the new system and the many who fail to do so . In Laos , as elsewhere , struggles over land create conflict among groups that are not equally endowed with political , social , and economic capital . Obviously , national and local elites have the upper hand in defining , for example , which “ commodities ” are eligible for compensation or not ( Green & Baird , 2016 ). The inhabitants of Vientiane , who for the most part belong to the Lao ethnic group , were able to oppose and eventually transform the plans of the Chinese building project because academics , local bourgeoisie , and city political elites left on the sidelines of the project were able to unite under the banner of national integrity . This shows that in such circumstances , nationalist arguments seem particularly efficacious for justifying opposition . At the other end of the continuum , the ethnic minorities of Attapeu — rural , illiterate , and often despised by local Lao who decry their “ backwardness ” and “ laziness ”— had very limited means to face a massive land grab organized by a multinational Vietnamese company and supported by both the Laotian and Vietnamese governments , in a remote province with little media coverage 11 . The other case studies developed here would fall somewhere in-between in terms of capacity for mobilization and media coverage .
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11 See also Kenney-Lazar ( 2010 , p . 13 ) about this difference of visibility . 102
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