Robert Cooper is a British subject who has lived overseas most of his life in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Laos. He received a PhD in Economic Anthropology after two years with Hmong villagers in Northern Thailand and Laos. Following publication of Resource Scarcity and the Hmong Response (Singapore University Press, 1984), he was elected Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Robert left an academic career in anthropology that included lectureships at Singapore, Chulalongkorn, and Chiang Mai universities to join the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He served with the UN in Laos, Geneva, Malawi, the Philippines, Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. In 2000, he became Head of the British Trade Office to Laos. He spent a year in Vietnam advising the government on poverty reduction, before returning to live and write in Vientiane, where he owns the bookshop Book-Café Vientiane and works on increasing literacy among young Lao. In addition to English, he sp
