This book is the first ethnography on Vietnam’s contemporary dissident movement. As a country that became known and is still remembered as one of the last remnants of Communist revolutions, Vietnam has managed to lift itself from one of the poorest war-torn post-colonies to one of the fastest growing market economies in Southeast Asia. Yet, while holding on to the legacy of a communist-led liberation movement, the present-day Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) finds itself subject to political challenges from below. In recent years, dissident voices critical of the party-state's malgovernance over social, economic and environmental issues have mushroomed across classes, generations and provinces. Based on extensive ethnographic data, this book explores distinct political practices and political ideas of Vietnam's dissidents. It examines different anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian practices of democracy, labour, peasant and religious activists and reveals that anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian practices are—at times—motivated by nationalist, anti-communist and statist ideas and ideologies. Understanding this dissonance between political practices and political ideas within the context of global capitalism and coloniality lies at the heart of this book.

Vietnam annually sends a half million laborers to work at low-skill jobs abroad. Angie Ngọc Trần concentrates on ethnicity, class, and gender to examine how migrant workers belonging to the Kinh, Hoa, Hrê, Khmer, and Chãm ethnic groups challenge a transnational process that coerces and exploits them. Focusing on migrant laborers working in Malaysia, Trần looks at how they carve out a third space that allows them a socially accepted means of resistance to survive and even thrive at times. She also shows how the Vietnamese state uses Malaysia as a place to send poor workers, especially from ethnic minorities; how it manipulates its rural poor into accepting work in Malaysia; and the ways in which both countries benefit from the arrangement. A rare study of labor migration in the Global South, Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment answers essential questions about why nations export and import migrant workers and how the workers protect themselves not only within the system, but by circumventing it altogether.

A fresh look at the how US troops played a part in the resistance of US troops to the American war in Vietnam Even if you don't know much about the war in Vietnam, you've probably heard of "The Hanoi Hilton," or Hoa Lo Prison, where captured U.S. soldiers were held. What they did there and whether they were treated well or badly by the Vietnamese became lasting controversies. As military personnel returned from captivity in 1973, Americans became riveted by POW coming-home stories. What had gone on behind these prison walls? Along with legends of lionized heroes who endured torture rather than reveal sensitive military information, there were news leaks suggesting that others had denounced the war in return for favorable treatment. What wasn't acknowledged, however, is that U.S. troop opposition to the war was vast and reached well into Hoa Loa Prison. Half a century after the fact, Dissenting POWs emerges to recover this history, and to discover what drove the factionalism in Hoa Lo. Looking into the underlying factional divide between pro-war “hardliners” and anti-war “dissidents” among the POWs, authors Wilber and Lembcke delve into the postwar American culture that created the myths of the Hero-POW and the dissidents blamed for the loss of the war. What they found was surprising: It wasn’t simply that some POWs were for the war and others against it, nor was it an officers-versus-enlisted-men standoff. Rather, it was the class backgrounds of the captives and their pre-captive experience that drew the lines. After the war, the hardcore hero-holdouts—like John McCain—moved on to careers in politics and business, while the dissidents faded from view as the antiwar movement, that might otherwise have championed them, disbanded. Today, Dissenting POWs is a necessary myth-buster, disabusing us of the revisionism that has replaced actual GI resistance with images of suffering POWs—ennobled victims that serve to suppress the fundamental questions of America’s drift to endless war.

As the Vietnam War divided the nation, a network of antiwar coffeehouses appeared in the towns and cities outside American military bases. Owned and operated by civilian activists, GI coffeehouses served as off-base refuges for the growing number of active-duty soldiers resisting the war. In the first history of this network, David L. Parsons shows how antiwar GIs and civilians united to battle local authorities, vigilante groups, and the military establishment itself by building a dynamic peace movement within the armed forces. Peopled with lively characters and set in the tense environs of base towns around the country, this book complicates the often misunderstood relationship between the civilian antiwar movement, U.S. soldiers, and military officials during the Vietnam era. Using a broad set of primary and secondary sources, Parsons shows us a critical moment in the history of the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, when a chain of counterculture coffeehouses brought the war's turbulent politics directly to the American military's doorstep.

Since 1990 public political criticism has evolved into a prominent feature of Vietnam's political landscape. So argues Benedict Kerkvliet in his analysis of Communist Party–ruled Vietnam. Speaking Out in Vietnam assesses the rise and diversity of these public displays of disagreement, showing that it has morphed from family whispers to large-scale use of electronic media. In discussing how such criticism has become widespread over the last three decades, Kerkvliet focuses on four clusters of critics: factory workers demanding better wages and living standards; villagers demonstrating and petitioning against corruption and land confiscations; citizens opposing China's encroachment into Vietnam and criticizing China-Vietnam relations; and dissidents objecting to the party-state regime and pressing for democratization. He finds that public political criticism ranges from lambasting corrupt authorities to condemning repression of bloggers to protesting about working conditions. Speaking Out in Vietnam shows that although we may think that the party-state represses public criticism, in fact Vietnamese authorities often tolerate and respond positively to such public and open protests.

Depicts U.S. political leaders as the consistent driving force behind America's Vietnam commitment.

The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement

This book brings a new approach to the study of political change in East and Southeast Asia and demonstrate the importance of political ideas behind policies and politics. The traditional approach to studying the politics of a region is to focus on events, personalities, issues - the mechanics of the political process. What this volume looks to do is to step back and examine ideas and visions, as well as those who articulate them and/or put them into operation. The contributors thus aim to conceptualize what discourse means for political change in East and Southeast Asia, and how ideas in discourses affect political practice. As well as theorizing on the roles of intellectuals, ideas and discourses for processes of democratization, reform and change, the chapters also offer deep insights into the national and local, the general and the specific situation of the selected countries.

The papers in this volume cover a wide range of social, economic and ideological aspects of the culture of early Anglo-Saxon England, from an interdisciplinary perspective. The status of Anglo-Saxondom and Englishness as cultural and ethnic categories are a recurrent theme, while other topics include social and political structures, farming in medieval England, the spiritual world of the Anglo-Saxons, and the reconstruction of settlement.