Asian History Commons^™

Emulating Empire: Washington’S Preoccupation With British Counterinsurgency In Malaya And U.S. Commitment To Vietnam, Wen-Qing Ngoei

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This essay examines how Washington’s deep preoccupation with the British-Malayan counterinsurgency tactics–tactics that routed the guerilla fighters of the Malayan Communist Party–shaped US commitment to Vietnam. This US preoccupation, stoked by Britain’s (and Malaya’s) promotion of their counterinsurgency knowledge to US leaders, also influenced the lessons that US analysts and thinkers absorbed from the United States’ defeat in Indochina. Most studies of British-Malayan counterinsurgency and its connection to the Vietnam War fixate upon debating the relevance of the former to the latter and how this bears on US failures in Indochina. However, this essay focuses on the understudied fervor with …

From Essential To Expendable – Montagnards, Kurds, And U.S. Army Special Forces In Vietnam And Northern Iraq, Jake Brooks

Masters Theses, 2020-current

In the Vietnam and Iraqi conflicts, the U.S. Army Special Forces teamed up with indigenous ethnic monitories to bring the fight to all corners of the battle space, and to take advantage of their immense local knowledge and strategic locations. The Montagnards of Central Indochina and the Kurds in Northern Iraq allied with the Special Forces for a number of reasons: protection from their ruling governments, recognition for their movements for autonomy, increased access to better medicine and equipment, and the opportunity to strike back at their historical enemies. The Montagnards and Kurds taught the Green Berets how to better …

Res Historica, Volume 4, Lynneth Miller Renberg Phd, Alpha Rho Epsilon Phi Alpha Theta

Res Historica

The 2025 journal of historical research by Anderson University students, Res Historica.

The editorial team for this edition of Res Historica was Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg, Samuel Sanders, and Julia Ackerman. The cover art for this volume is an open access image.

To Negotiate A Labyrinth: Indonesia Within And Without Asean During The Third Indochina War (1978-1991), Daniel Mccoy

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Southeast Asia arrived at its most stable condition since the close of World War II. In Indochina, international communism triumphed over Western democracy. However, regional peace was fleeting and tenuous. Disparate communist ideologies and combustible, extra-regional power designs soon clashed. American retrenchment emboldened the Soviet Union and China, two competing communist forces, to fill the power vacuum and inflame the enmity unfolding between their respective client states: Vietnam and Cambodia. Mounting violence between the pair culminated in late 1978 when Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea, unleashing the Third Indochina War. The Vietnamese-Cambodian War, the …

Creative Citizen Peacebuilding: Japanese Artists And Audiences Respond To The Vietnam-American War, Long T. Bui, Ayako Sahara

Peace and Conflict Studies

This article explores two case studies related to South Vietnam and Japan, relating them to the controversial history and legacy of the Second Indochina War. The first is the Japanese adoption and adaptation of South Vietnamese antiwar music. The second is a Japanese film, uncovered decades later after the war, exposing the role of Japan in South Vietnam. Cultural productions, from nations allied with the United States, sought to expose the popular struggle for peace against the rising tide of Cold War military violence and corporate capitalist exploitation. Through interviews, archival research, and textual analysis, the article argues for a …

A Distinction Without A Difference: Vietnam, Sir Robert Thompson, And The Policing Failures Of Vietnam, Mark J. Rothermel

Madison Historical Review

The scholarship analyzing the failure of the American involvement in Vietnam began even before the war finished. Whether the Orthodox School which considered the war unwinnable or the revisionist which argued there was a path to victory for the Americans, there have been libraries of tomes arguing who or what was to blame for the American defeat. An increased amount of scholarship recently has been written regarding the influence of British officer Sir Robert Thompson and his attempt to advise both the South Vietnamese and American war efforts.

Thompson, who gained fame as one of the key leaders for the …

Can’T Bear It! Employing Culturally Sensitive Initiatives To Reduce Bear Bile Demand In Northern Vietnam, Alicia Ngo, Shannon Randolph

EnviroLab Asia

Over the past 30 years, the combination of over-hunting, habitat loss, and increased bear bile demand has caused significant declines in Asiatic black bear (aka moon bear; Ursus thibetanus) and sun bear (Helarctos malayanus) populations. In Eastern medicine, bear bile is extracted from the gallbladders of bears and is then used to treat a wide range of inflammatory, liver, and degenerative ailments. However, the use of bear bile has had significant impacts on bear populations. Given that communities in Northern Vietnam have a lengthy history of using bear bile and bear bile is easily accessible, merely advocating …

The Unknown War: Army Of The Republic Of Vietnam Combat Operations 1962-1963, Justin Major

Master's Theses

The American historiography of the Vietnam War has tended to focus on the actions of the United States Armed Forces, the People’s Army of Vietnam, and the Viet Cong, while the history of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) has remained largely untold. ARVN, when mentioned, is usually portrayed as incompetent, ineffective, and even cowardly. Recently, historians like Andrew Wiest and Mark Moyar have challenged this view of ARVN that was originally advanced by journalists Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam. Moyar even suggested that ARVN was winning the war until the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh …

Health Preferences And Culturally Appropriate Strategies To Reduce Bear Bile Demand In Northern Vietnam, Shannon Randolph, Laura Zhang, Lena Tran, Mai Nguyen, Kimberley Ha

EnviroLab Asia

Animal products, such as pangolin scales, rhinoceros horns, tiger bones, and bear bile have been used in East Asian traditional medicine (TM) for more than 2,000 years. However, markets for medicinal wildlife products have expanded dramatically in countries like China and Vietnam in recent decades where economic prosperity has enabled a larger proportion of the population to afford wildlife products (Olmedo et al. 2017). Related new farming and commercialization practices to meet growing international demand pose environmental and human health risks. Animal products also symbolize shared cultural and historical medical practices that are distinct from the dominant Western medical model.

Letter To My Homeland, Vy Thuy Doan

EnviroLab Asia

"I never thought I would be returning back to Vietnam to study its environmental issues and in studying them, also unravel more of my identity," the author writes about her remarkable experience on the January 2018 EnviroLab Asia Clinic trip to Vietnam. Hers is a compelling meditation on the diasporic experience.

Imagining Revolutionary Feminism: Communist Asia And The Women Of The Black Panther Party, Benjamin Young

Research & Publications

Using newspapers, autobiographies, and interviews, this article examines the ways in which women of the Black Panther Party imagined the women of Vietnam, China, and North Korea as radical archetypes during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Using Judy Wu’s theory of “radical orientalism” in conversation with Ashley Farmer’s concept of the “gendered imaginary,” I argue that the Panther women imagined the women of “the East” as pioneers in world revolution and women’s liberation in order to protest against gendered injustices within the Party and broader U.S. society. This article also investigates the realities on the ground for the women …

The Vietnam Report: National Landscape, Current Challenges And Opportunities For Growth, Institute For Societal Leadership, John W. Ellington

Institute of Societal Leadership Research Collection

Although most of Southeast Asia is home to religions and cultures carrying significant Indic influence, Vietnam alone is the mainland’s only Sinicised culture. Chinese emperors directly ruled northern Vietnam for most of the period spanning 111 BCE to 938 CE. The next eight hundred years saw a series of independent Vietnamese kingdoms administered by Chinese-style mandarins gradually extend control over and supplant the Indic Champa civilisation to the south—even as French incursions began chipping away at Vietnamese territory as early as 1858.

Special Issue: Revisiting And Reconstructing The Nghê Tinh Soviets, 1930-2011, Tobias Frederik Rettig

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The seven papers presented here constitute the first collective effort in a Western language to revisit the Nghe Tinh Soviets of 1930–31. The Nghe Tinh movement, its name a compound of two neighbouring provinces in the north-central part of the French protectorate of Annam, not only occupies a special place in the history of the early Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) but also became a site for animated debate on the causes of agrarian unrest that produced two of the most influential books in South East Asian Studies: James Scott’s Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976); and Samuel Popkin’s The Rational …

Walking The Tightrope: The United States’ Policy In Vietnam, 1952-1954, Erin Flynn

Annual Celebration of Student Scholarship and Creativity

This thesis demonstrates how the Truman and Eisenhower administrations sought to avoid direct intervention in Indochina and halt the spread of communism at the same time. This purpose is achieved through careful analysis of primary and secondary sources, with a particular focus on the primary documentation found in Foreign Relations of the United States: 1952-1954. Through examination of these day-by-day recordings and memos, the futility of pursuing the two conflicting aims becomes clear.

“No Responsibility And No Rice”: The Rise And Fall Of Agricultural Collectivization In Vietnam, Chad Raymond

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

Communist leaders in Vietnam attempted to use agricultural collectivization to transform a poor, agrarian country into a modern, socialist nation with an industrialized economy. Collectivized agricultural production lacked sufficient economic incentives for Vietnamese farmers; they preferred to produce privately for household consumption or the free market. State-initiated reforms to collectivize agriculture failed to improve the performance of the agricultural sector and eventually the Vietnamese Communist Party was forced to abandon collectivization altogether. Once farmers were freed from collective labor and could pursue private production for the free market, Vietnam’s agricultural output skyrocketed.

Y A-T-Il Une Réception Critique De La Littérature Vietnamienne Francophone?, Ching Selao

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Three approaches seem to characterize the reception of Vietnamese Literature in French: socio-historical, "essentialist" and feminist discourses. This article proposes to analyse the lack of theoretical thought and pertinence in some of the works published on the subject, which appear to introduce and promote this literature rather than study it. Without denying contributions that are indeed interesting, this paper, however, emphasizes works that raise questions and oblige us to ask: is there a critical reception of Vietnamese Francophone Literature?

Linda Lê : Schizo-Positive?, Isabelle Favre

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In her novel entitled "Calomnies", Linda Lê depicts a "mad uncle" and a young female writer fascinated with her uncle’s marginality. In this book, Lê presents a complex view of schizophrenia. Sometimes, the actions and thoughts of the uncle are reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts such as le corps sans organe and la machine célibataire. Some other times however, Lê pays attention to the past of the uncle and shows how, in Vietnam, he witnessed the hypocrisy of his family during the war. These passages are then closer to Laing’s theories, since the environment and conditions in which he …

Voice Of The People (Fa 83), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of student papers (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 83. The Voice of the People: An Understanding of Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese in Bowling Green, Kentucky. A Western Kentucky University Folk Studies project directed by Dr. Lynwood Montell, involving 9 students and 26 informants. Several of the interview transcriptions are available by downloading (Click "Download" button on the right) the finding aid and clicking on the hyperlinks in the text.

French Military Policies In The Aftermath Of The Yên Bay Mutiny, 1930: Old Security Dilemmas Return To The Surface, Tobias Frederik Rettig

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper provides a brief summary of the Yên Bay mutiny of 10 February 1930, before examining its links to a wider insurrectionary attempt by the Vietnamese Nationalist Party in parts of Tonkin and the reasons why the attempted insurrection was to begin at Yên Bay but not in other garrison towns. It then places the mutiny in a context in which the use of Vietnamese soldiers in French service was necessary in order to maintain French supremacy as a colonial and protectorate power in French Indo-China. But instead of focusing on the mutiny itself and its causes, the main …

Containment, Cliency And The Revolution In Vietnam, Deborah Tompsett-Makin

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

This thesis addresses the question, why does U.S. foreign policy contribute to political instability in developing nations? To ascertain the answer, it analyzes the post-World War II administrations from Truman through Johnson. One mode of containment, cliency, a foreign policy relationship between a major power and a weaker state, is developed within the framework analyzing containment. The cliency model provides a theoretical basis for explaining how the domestic structure of the client state is systematically distorted by the patron's actions in pursuit of its global interests. The cliency model is also linked to the pattern of development and stability of …

Eisenhower, Vietnam, And The Geneva Conference Of 1954, Dean Rourke Jr.

History Theses & Dissertations

The thesis examines the 1954 Geneva Conference which appeared to be a turning point in America's foreign policy in Indochina. The Conference was initially held to discuss the Korean War armistice but as the the French position in Indochina deteriorated, the Conference evolved into a French effort to end their Indochina commitment and, thus, the first Indochina war. The role of the Eisenhower administration at Geneva and whether that role was part of a clearly defined foreign policy agenda or a policy that merely reacted to events as they occurred is examined. The thesis shows that a negative attitude toward …