The Anti-Vietnam War Movement: International Activism and the Search for World Peace (2025)

A Divided Generation: How Anti-Vietnam War Student Activists Overcame Internal and External Divisions to End the War in Vietnam

2018

Far too often, student protest movements and organizations of the 1960s and 1970s are treated as monolithic in their ideologies, goals, and membership. This paper dives into the many divides within groups like Students for a Democratic Society and Young Americans for Freedom during their heyday in the Vietnam War Era. Based on original primary source research on the “Radical Pamphlets Collection” in Musselman Library Special Collections, Gettysburg College, this study shows how these various student activist groups both overcame these differences and were torn apart by them. The paper concludes with a discussion about what made the Vietnam War Era the prime time for student activism and what factors have prevented mass student protest since then.

The Vietnam Women's Movement for the Right to Live: a non-communist opposition movement to the American war in Vietnam

Critical Asian Studies, 2018

The US Anti-Vietnam War Movement (1964-1973

"Student Activism in Time of War Youth in the Republic of Vietnam, 1960s–1970s," Journal of Vietnamese Studies 10, No. 2 (Spring 2015): 43-81.

The 1960s is usually associated with the rise of student activism globally. While students in the West took to the streets for social change, those in the Republic of Vietnam were similarly active and organized. This paper examines Vietnamese student organizations and their activities, which were diverse and dynamic. Whereas radical groups agitated for political reforms and an end to war, more moderate student associations were mobilized for war-relief activities. Despite the restrictions on rights and freedoms in South Vietnam, youth organizations were still able to have their voices heard and make an impact on society.

Vietnam Antiwar Movement

Vietnam in global context (1920-1968): looking through the lens of three historical figures

2019

This article explores the connectedness between Martin Luther King's, Ernesto Guevara's and Rabindranath Tagore's ideas and anti-colonial resistance in Vietnam. By showing how three different local struggles were linked to the socio-political realities in Vietnam, the three can be seen as representatives of a way of thinking global and local in political struggles under the principle of anti-colonial resistance and universal self-determination. In this way, it is argued that looking through the lens of dissident intellectuals and political activists provides a methodological groundwork through which we can experience global intellectual connectedness that counterbalances existing Westerncentric perspectives on Vietnamese history. However, global intellectual connectedness has to be taken with a pinch of salt, because thoughts and ideas have always been defined by and modified under different socio-political circumstances, in this case: for the purpose of strengthening the national cause.

In the Service of World Revolution: Vietnamese Communists’ Radical Ambitions through the Three Indochina Wars

Journal of Cold War Studies, 2019

The terms “decolonization” and “Cold War” refer to specific processes and periods in the international system, but they do not capture the full agency of local actors such as Vietnamese Communists. Based on recently available archival materials from Hanoi, this article maps those terms onto Vietnamese Communist thinking through four specific cases. The declassified materials underscore the North Vietnamese leaders’ deep commitment to a radical worldview and their occasional willingness to challenge Moscow and Beijing for leadership of world revolution. The article illuminates the connections (or lack thereof) between global, regional, and local politics and offers a more nuanced picture of how decolonization in Southeast Asia in the 1950s–1980s sparked not only a Cold War confrontation but also a regional war.

Review Essay of Vietnam's Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) by Tuong Vu and Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945-1960 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2020) by Alec Holcombe.

Journal of Vietnamese Studies Vol. 17, Issue 1, p. 58-66., 2022

https://online.ucpress.edu/jvs/article-abstract/17/1/58/119761/Review-Vietnam-s-Communist-Revolution-The-Power?redirectedFrom=fulltext

"Freedom, Violence, and the Struggle over the Public Arena in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945-58

Christopher Goscha and Bénoit de Tréglodé, eds., La naissance d'un Etat-Parti. Le Vietnam depuis 1945, 1945

This paper looks briefly at the colonial origins of the public sphere, then turns to the transformation of the public sphere from 1945-58. The initial desire for freedom confronted violence against dissent, and it also confronted the desire of the DRV state to control the public realm. By 1958, many intellectuals had been marginalized from their leadership roles in shaping public opinion, replaced by those who toed the Party line. The revolution had eaten its children.

Understanding Antiwar Activism as a Gendering Activity: A look at the U.S.'s Anti-Vietnam War Movement

Journal of International Women's Studies, 2012

Research into the gendered nature of war experiences has provided rich ways of understanding how gender constructs society and the nation. Scholarship on peace activism and gender has deepened our knowledge of women’s roles within warring societies and the ways women have understood themselves as promoters of peace. While much of this research asks how antiwar activities and war are predicated upon dominant gender ideals and focuses in particular on women’s experiences, this article aims to explore how some wartime events, specifically antiwar activism, constitutes or reconstitutes gender. Focusing on the United States’ anti-Vietnam War history, I examine how activists cemented, challenged and made anew notions of femininity and masculinity within and through this antiwar arena. I argue that both women and men activists created opportunities within the anti-Vietnam War movement to reconceptualise links between war and gender. Though feminist scholars have elucidated the splits that occurred amongst these women activists, this article seeks to situate these divisions within contested understandings of femininity, as well as to extend scholarly exploration into competing notions of antiwar masculinities.