War Southeast Asia Research Articles

Jimmy Carter, Vietnam, and the Rhetoric of Gratitude: Antecedents to the Noble Cause

Abstract The study of the Vietnam War and American presidential discourse has followed a somewhat meandering path. The Vietnam discourse of Jimmy Carter remains the most poorly understood of the late Cold War presidents. Throughout the 1970s, Carter participated in, and at times led, the national debate over the federal government's responsibility to Vietnam veterans. He spoke of a debt of gratitude that the American people owed to the war's veterans. As president, parts of his domestic agenda prioritized Vietnam veterans, leading him to preside over commemorative events for the war's veterans on several occasions. During his time in elective office, he alternatingly defined the purpose of the war in Southeast Asia as preserving the American way of life, promoting democracy, or defending liberty and freedom. Carter practiced an ethics of remembering that sought to redeem the American soldier, to erase the divisiveness of the past, and to “delegitimize and marginalize anti-war opinions.”1 Despite the obvious importance of both his discourse and his actions, Carter's Vietnam War rhetoric has received very little attention.

Book review: Regilme Jr, S. S. F. Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia

Regilme Jr, S. S. F. Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 308 pp. £64.95, ISBN 9780472132782 (e-book).

Prehistory and Ideology in Cold War Southeast Asia: The Politics of Wartime Archaeology in Thailand and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1954–1975

The two decades comprised within the partition of Vietnam and the end of the Indochina Wars surprisingly saw major advances in prehistoric archaeology in the region. This article examines the political context and implications of archaeological investigations conducted in Thailand and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under the guidance of, respectively, American and Soviet specialists, as an aspect of the cultural Cold War. Archaeological discoveries in both countries debunked colonial archaeology’s account of prehistoric Southeast Asia as a passive recipient of Chinese cultural influence by documenting autonomous technological development. The article argues that the new image of mainland Southeast Asia’ prehistory that formed by the early 1970s reflected the superpowers’ objective of empowering the region’s postcolonial nation-states notwithstanding their political contrasts, yet it was not equally congruent with the nationalist narratives of Thailand and North Vietnam.

Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia , by Salvador Santino Fulo Regilme Jr

Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia , by Salvador Santino Fulo Regilme Jr

Disaggregating Asian American and Pacific Islander Risk of Fatal Police Violence.

High rates and racial inequities in U.S. fatal police violence are an urgent area of public health concern and policy attention. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have been described as experiencing low rates of fatal police violence, yet AAPI subgroups vary widely on nearly every demographic and economic metric. Here, we calculate fatal police violence rates by AAPI regional and national/ethnic background, finding wide variation. We compile a list of AAPI people killed in interactions with police in 2013-2019, then use web searches and surname algorithms to identify decedents' backgrounds. Rates are then calculated by combining this numerator data with population denominators from the American Community Survey and fitting Poisson models. Excluding 18% of deaths with missing regional backgrounds, East and South Asian Americans died at a rate of 0.05 and 0.04 deaths per 100,000 (95% CI: 0.04-0.06 and 0.02-0.08), respectively, less than a third of Southeast Asian Americans' rate (0.16, CI: 0.13-0.19). Pacific Islanders suffered higher rates (0.88, CI: 0.65-1.19), on par with Native and Black Americans. More granularly, Southeast Asian American groups displaced by US war in Southeast Asia suffered higher rates than others from the same region. Traditional racial classifications thus obscure high risks of fatal police violence for AAPI subgroups. Disaggregation is needed to improve responses to fatal police violence and its racial/ethnic inequities.

Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia. By Salvador Santino F. RegilmeJr . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 294p. $80.00 cloth.

Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia. By Salvador Santino F. RegilmeJr . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 294p. $80.00 cloth. - Volume 20 Issue 3

REVIEW ESSAY – THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE

This review essay was prompted by a reading of Salvador Santino F. Regilme's (2021) book entitled Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia ( Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). American development aid is motivated by a mixture of security, commercial, and humanitarian interests. All three rationales are characteristic for foreign aid since the Second World War, but not always in the same mix. Security concerns were quite influential in the 1950s and early 1960s and again after 9/11. Regilme describes American foreign aid rationales for two Southeast Asian countries (the Philippines and Thailand) and shows how quickly humanitarian considerations give way to security interests. What makes his study quite unique is that he focuses on the intertwinement of donor and recipient interests. Both donor and recipient act more on the basis of territorial and domestic concerns than with an eye on international, humanitarian needs.

Aid imperium: United States foreign policy and human rights in post-Cold War southeast Asia

Aid imperium: United States foreign policy and human rights in post-Cold War southeast Asia

The Strategic Value of China's Foreign Policy and The Rivalry of The Majors Power in The Indo-Pacific

The Indo-Pacific in the development of world politics is a meeting place for stakeholders from the US, China, Japan, India, Australia, and ASEAN to articulate each country's strategic interests. The rivalry between the US and China has been referred to as the new cold war in Southeast Asia. This momentum is an excellent opportunity for ASEAN to develop and expand its role in the Indo-Pacific by emphasizing centrality and putting its role to good use. Including the challenges of how China projects its strategic values to Australia, Japan, and India. This research analyzes the strategic value and emerging challenges of Majors Power in the Indo-Pacific. This article uses the theory balance of power with a qualitative descriptive method. It explains how China expands its influence in the Indo-Pacific region by increasing the distribution of rising power, new security concepts, peaceful rise, engagement, and comprehensive establishments and how this strategic value poses a challenge to India, the US, Australia, and Japan. The rise of the Indo-Pacific is one of the influences involving the superpowers by looking at the potential in the region. This is inextricably linked to China's national interest. The results of this research is that China uses the strategic value of rising power and new security concepts in its rivalry with the US and ASEAN. Concerning Australia, China prioritizes engagement and comprehensive establishment by leveraging economic benefits. In addition, China has shown a peaceful rise and engagement, as well as geopolitical rivalries with Japan and India.

The origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia: Pre-Second World War Siamese cooperation with foreign powers against communism

The origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia are most often located in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in the late 1940s. Historians sometimes trace its origins to Japan's expansionist phase in the 1930s, which accelerated the decline of the European and American colonial order in this part of Asia. However, the necessity of the fight against communism appeared very clearly in the minds of the leaders of the major colonial powers well before the 1930s. Focused on the case of Siam, this article aims to show that the origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia dated back to as early as the 1920s with the emergence of international cooperation in the fight against communism and the Thai elite's manipulation of imperialist powers to further their own political agenda and support their dominance in the domestic political arena. The Cold War in Southeast Asia was not only about the postwar fight against the spread of communism, but also closely intertwined with the decolonisation and nation-building efforts of every country in the region — including of the so-called un-colonised Thailand.

수용소 이후의 수용소와 인종화된 식민주의

The following paper examines the course in which the colonial hierarchy of violence is internalized as multi-layered racism through the experiences of the soldiers from Okinawa and the Korean guards at Japanese POW camps during WWII. Although the Korean guards oversaw Allied prisoners of war in Japan’s WWII camps, they were under watch themselves by their Japanese counterparts and superiors. In a somewhat similar way, the soldiers from Okinawa contributed to Japan’s colonial rule in East Asia while being subject to Japan’s “internal colonialism.” I will describe the nature of their two-sided involvement as “victimhood implicated in perpetration of violence”, and I will seek ways to liberate their experience from the relations that are colonized and institutionalized.<BR>What lies within the purview of this paper are the experiences of (1) the people from Okinawa who were gunzoku-militarized personnel of the Japanese imperial army-and (2) the Korean guards who oversaw the Allied prisoners of war in Southeast Asia between 1942 and 1945. In addition, the literary work, testimonies, and other written accounts of institutionalized life in the years that followed will also be examined.<BR>The first case to be examined is Yi Yŏngkil (李永吉), a Korean guard at the Japanese POW camp whose Japanese name was Yoshimoto Nagayoshi (慶本永吉), for which his writings as well as the testimonies of his coworkers will be analyzed. During the course of his life, Yi was taken from the POW camp to a detention center, and was eventually placed in a psychiatric ward, being faced with a number of different forms of institutionalization in conjunction with colonization.<BR>Yi’s case is followed by the analysis of the series of fictional and archival writings that reveal the course in which the Korean and Okinawan gunzokus in Southeast Asia came to participate in the independence movement in Indonesia after 1945. By comparing Okinawan writer Ōta Ryōhaku’s Black Diamond (1949) with the Korean guards’ written accounts, I attempt to question whether it is possible that decolonization of one colonized community lead to decolonization of other colonized communities.<BR>The goal of this paper is to seek how the Korean and the Okinawan people-the people who are marked by “victimhood implicated in perpetration of violence”-can truly be liberated from the post-concentration camp institutionalization and the colonization that persists even in the aftermath of colonialism through the case of what I call “concomitance of two independences.” By drawing connections among various “abjects”, my intention is neither to keep their experience as abject nor to request their inclusion in the conventional space of historiography, but to suggest a new imaginary where a series of abjected experiences become connected in unexpected ways.

Mental health among the Hmong population in the U.S.: A systematic review of the influence of cultural and social factors

Summary As refugees of the war in Southeast Asia, Hmong experienced various traumatic events. Evidence suggests the persistence of psychiatric disorders related to trauma in refugees even after prolonged resettlement in their host country. This systematic review aimed to summarize the mental health literature on the Hmong population with a focus on cultural and social factors. The databases PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, Social Services Abstracts, Web of Science, and PubMed were reviewed for peer-reviewed articles published up to April 2018. Forty articles were included in the final review. Findings Results highlight three primary themes: (1) mental health outcomes were associated with a variety of premigration and postmigration factors, (2) group and community-based treatment and interventions provided promising results, and (3) barriers to mental health care were primarily stigma, communication challenges, discrimination, and mental health literacy. The results of this systematic review shed light on the limited and small studies with the Hmong population. Applications Implications for social work and culture-sensitive research, practice, and policymaking for this population are discussed.

Japan and the shaping of post-Vietnam War Southeast Asia

Japan and the shaping of post-Vietnam War Southeast Asia

The Korean War and US-Indonesia Relations, 1950-1954

The Korean War, which broke out very closely upon the heels of the Communist victory in China, immediately assumed global implications beyond the boundaries of the Korean Peninsula. Essentially a Korean civil war, it immediately became a major ‘hot war’ in the Cold War in Asia. This paper discusses the relations between the United States and Indonesia in the aftermath of the North Korean attack on South Korea, covering the period from the outbreak of the war in 1950 through to the end of the war in 1954. The paper explores the various ways in which the United States attempted to co-opt and coerce Indonesia into the Western camp in the Cold War, and Indonesia’s responses thereto. The central theme of the paper is the interplay between the United States’ policy of containment and the Indonesian policy of non-alignment in the Cold War. An examination of the United States’ policy toward Indonesia, a non-communist but non-aligned nation, vis-à-vis the Korean War, would serve to illustrate the dynamics and nature of the Cold War in Southeast Asia.

The Vietnam War and Chicana/o Environmentalism in El Grito del Norte (1968–73)

The Vietnam War and Chicana/o Environmentalism in El Grito del Norte (1968–73) Emily Cheng (bio) This essay addresses El Grito del Norte (EGDN), a Chicana/o nationalist newspaper published in Española, a small working-class town in northern New Mexico, from 1968 to 1973. The paper was originally formed to support the politics of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), the organization led by Reies López Tijerina that in the 1960s and 1970s sought the restoration of land grants established under the Spanish and Mexican governments. Written and run by women, the paper was founded and edited by Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez (known previously as Elizabeth Sutherland), whose socialist and third-world feminist politics shaped the paper's concern with the connections between rural Chicana women of New Mexico and other women of color in the US and abroad.1 Though the paper was committed to Chicana/o issues grounded in New Mexico, it soon moved away from its original role as a mouthpiece for the Alianza to include reports on indigenous issues in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. EGDN was, in Martínez's words, the "only one" of "about twenty Chicano newspapers … that was completely international."2 Of particular importance was the newspaper's reporting on Vietnam, which made it exceptional among a Chicano press in the 1960s that, George Mariscal notes, "was largely silent on the topic of the war in Southeast Asia."3 The paper's coverage included a special issue on North Vietnam by Martínez, a five-part series by Valentina Valdez explaining Vietnam and the war to readers, articles addressing Chicanos serving in the military by Enriqueta Vasquez that appeared in "El Soldado Razo Today" and her column, "Despierten! Hermanos," reports on the military events of the war, poetry by Ho Chi Minh, and a report on the Chicano Viêt Nam Project, a solidarity organization.4 While other scholars have written about the newspaper's concerns with land in New Mexico and, to a lesser extent, its third-world feminist politics, I examine how these aspects of the paper come together with its internationalism [End Page 55] to represent a distinctive and radical "environmental" politics. I do not mean to argue that the writers and activists who contributed to EGDN identified themselves as environmentalists or to attach this label to them. What I do want to argue is that, in contrast to the mainstream environmental movement that emerged in this period, these women writers possessed an environmental understanding that fundamentally engaged social justice, particularly around issues of race, gender, and imperialism. The environmental epistemology in EGDN was shaped by, but moved beyond, the long-standing relationship between Mexican-origin people, land, and nature in the US Southwest that was central to Chicana/o nationalist politics, as I discuss through Vasquez's article "La Santa Tierra." In considering Vietnam as another site in which to explore and understand the violence the US empire inflicts on land and colonized people, EGDN made connections between the US Southwest and Vietnam that developed its alternative environmental lens. Approaching the North Vietnamese as fellow peasants, or "campesinos," whose harmonious relationship to the land was being attacked by US imperialism, the newspaper made womanhood central to forging this relationship between Chicana/o and North Vietnamese anticolonialism. The feminist politics of "global sisterhood" facilitated the writers' interest in Vietnam, and their access to direct encounters with Vietnamese women through the international women's peace movement. The women writers of the paper also deployed a gendered lens that highlighted the role of women in environmental resistance to masculine military violence and symbolically established similarities between the two communities through idealized portrayals of rural, domestic life. With its attention to the lived human relationship to land, EGDN offered an alternative to notions of land that were central to mainstream American environmental thinking, which generally assumed the "separability of the human and natural realms … expressed through a melancholic attitude linking natural plenitude with human absence."5 In this mainstream tradition, land has been considered through the ideal of wilderness, and the human realm predominantly characterized by the individual relationship to the land through possession...

Japan and the Shaping of Post-Vietnam War Southeast Asia: Japanese Diplomacy and the Cambodia Conflict, 1978–1993

Japan and the Shaping of Post-Vietnam War Southeast Asia: Japanese Diplomacy and the Cambodia Conflict, 1978–1993

When art was political: Historicising decolonisation and the Cold War in Southeast Asia through curatorial practice

In Asia, and in Southeast Asia in particular, the Cold War was far from cold, witnessing the most deadly conflicts and political massacres of the second half of the twentieth century. Also, the clash of ideologies there did not follow a binary logic but included a third force, nationalism, which was rooted in the anticolonialist movements of the interwar years and played a significant role even in countries that decolonised peacefully after the end of the Second World War. The Cold War thus overlapped with the twin process of decolonisation and nation-building, which had its founding moment at the Asian-African Conference at Bandung in 1955, where the non-aligned camp, which advocated a neutral position vis-à-vis the two rival blocs, coalesced (one year ealier, the anticommunist Southeast Asia Treaty Organization had been established). Postcolonial aspirations to national progress that tied socioeconomic development to the civic and cultural elevation of the citizenry were widely shared among newly decolonised countries. By the mid-1960s, however, the utopian ‘Bandung Spirit’ had lost ground to Cold War realpolitik; intra-Asian and communal conflicts fomented by Cold War enmities (the Sino–Indian War of 1962, the Indo–Pakistani War of 1965, Indonesia's anticommunist purges of 1965–66) along with the escalation of the Vietnam War and the consequent exacerbation of regional divisions, belied governments’ earlier commitment to human rights, Third World solidarity and world peace. The authoritarian involution of several Asian countries that were often American allies, redoubled by the opening of their economies to multinational corporations, led many artists and intellectuals to embrace political activism. The conception of art as a revolutionary instrument in the service of the masses had been famously articulated by Mao Zedong at the Yan'an Forum in 1942. In China, Mao's prescriptions on art were sidelined, though never officially repudiated, only in the early 1990s, following the end of the Cold War and the adoption of a socialist market economy, by acknowledging the necessity ‘to respect and guarantee the creativity of individuals’.

Sociability in International Politics: Golf and ASEAN's Cold War Diplomacy

AbstractSociability or “the play form of association” appears in a range of interactions in world politics sited at banquets, drinking gatherings, golf courses, and even the sauna. Notwithstanding this salience, the form and effects of sociability are poorly understood in International Relations. This article fills this gap. It conceptualizes sociability—its distinct sociological structure; its variations along class, race, and gender; its effects on social interaction—and argues that sociability matters in world politics. Specifically, sociability contributes to identity formation and community maintenance, enables learning, produces social capital, and generates a “backstage” where actors can manage disagreement. I substantiate this argument by examining the sociability fostered from playing golf in the diplomacy of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). I explain why golf emerged as a sociable practice in capitalist ASEAN's diplomacy in contrast to socialist and nonaligned circuits of Cold War Southeast Asia; examine the elite and male-homosocial character of this sociability; suggest how it influenced the Associations’ diplomacy; and outline the structural shifts that have led to its post–Cold War decline. This article contributes to the study of sociability in world politics, international practice theory, the political sociology of leisure, and the international politics of Southeast Asia.

Propaganda intelligence and covert action: the Regional Information Office and British intelligence in South-East Asia, 1949-1961

ABSTRACTThis article explores the intersections between propaganda, intelligence and covert action through the experience of Britain’s Regional Information Office (RIO) in Singapore. RIO defined its functions as ‘propaganda intelligence’: the generation of intelligence to guide propaganda output and analysis of enemy propaganda to feed into the broader intelligence picture of communist intentions. This highlights the interdependency of intelligence and propaganda. RIO worked closely with MI5 and MI6 in developing intelligence on communist China and North Vietnam. Evaluating the position of RIO within Britain’s regional intelligence network also reveals some of the complexities of the late-imperial intelligence system. It illuminates the changing status of different intelligence activities and the growth of a particular intelligence culture, providing insight into how Britain engaged with the clandestine Cold War in South-East Asia.

There and back again: What the Cold War for Southeast Asia can teach us about Sino-US competition in the region today

This essay examines how the history of the Cold War in Southeast Asia has shaped, and will likely continue to shape, the current Sino-US rivalry in the region. Expert commentary today typically focuses on the agendas and actions of the two big powers, the United States and China, which actually risks missing the bigger picture. During the Cold War, leaders of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) played a critical role in containing Chinese influence, shaping the terms of Sino-US competition and rapprochement, and deepening the US presence in Southeast Asia. The legacy of ASEAN’s foreign relations during and since the Cold War imposes constraints on Chinese regional ambitions today, which militates against the popular notion that Chinese hegemony in East and Southeast Asia is inevitable. This essay underscores that current analyses of the brewing crisis in and around the South China Sea must routinely look beyond the two superpowers to the under-appreciated agency of small- and middle-sized ASEAN actors who, in reality, are the ones who hold the fate of the region in their hands.