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| 1 |
ID:
142773
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| Summary/Abstract |
The fortieth anniversary of the rise of communist governments in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia looks different to the Lao compared to how it does for the Vietnamese. 30 April 1975 is undoubtedly a crucial date in Vietnamese history – one that is significant inside and outside of Vietnam. But few people from Laos, either within the country or residing in diaspora communities in the United States, France, Canada, Australia or New Zealand – the main countries where refugees ended up after fleeing across the Mekong River to Thailand from Laos beginning in 1975 – attach much significance to it. However, the year 1975 is another matter altogether. As with Vietnam, the year is important for people from Laos, as 1975 is one of the most significant ‘time markers’ for those on both ends of the political spectrum, including those living inside Laos and outside of the country. It is the same year that Laos dissolved its constitutional monarchy and became the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). But Laos did not “fall to communism” in the same way as South Vietnam and Cambodia. The fall of the governments in both countries occurred decisively on particular dates in 1975 (30 April and 17 April respectively) when communist forces rode triumphantly into Saigon and Phnom Penh.
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| 2 |
ID:
142776
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper highlights contextual impacts of the de-Russianisation process in the western post-Soviet space formed by three restored and three new nation-states. The demographic trends indicate that in the territorial configuration of this geopolitical zone of Europe the numbers of Russians are decreasing. The key question considered in this paper is whether the de-Russianisation and ethno-political mobilisation processes of the Russophone population contribute to stabilisation or destabilisation of the multi-ethnic societies and their given nation-states. This analysis considers whether articulations of ethno-political interests of Russophone populations sustain the multi-ethnic state consolidation processes based upon civic political nation conceptions or whether Russian ethnicity-based parties complicate necessary nation-state consolidation processes. The specified de-Russianisation tendencies are evolving in the geopolitical zone between the European Union and the Russian Federation and create a differentiated context of changing political, geo-cultural and geo-economic relationships that are developing since the breakdown of the USSR.
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| 3 |
ID:
142775
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| Summary/Abstract |
The shooting ended forty years ago but American scholars still fight over how to interpret the Vietnam War. Historians, especially, continue to debate the meaning, significance, and experience of the Second Indochina War. Skirmishes in 2011 over a college textbook pitted conventional US-centric narratives emphasising American actors against Vietnam-centric narratives stressing the other side.1 In 2014, critical portrayals of US military conduct in Vietnam stirred old battle lines arraying hawks versus doves, many of whom have one eye trained on ongoing interventions in the Middle East.2 Such polarised debates often reproduce simplistic, binary representations of what was, in fact, a complex Cold War conflict unfolding through a hot civil war. They do so to the neglect of the everyday experience of people who lived through it.
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| 4 |
ID:
142780
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| Summary/Abstract |
Over the last twenty years, European Union (EU) actorness at both regional and global scales, has become a fruitful topic of analysis in the field of political science, and more specifically in international relations and political geography. Critical geopolitics dedicated many substantive papers on EU discourses and representations. Our paper aims at providing a complementary way to study texts issued by the EU and to question EU actorness by adopting an approach based on textual analysis. The corpus examined includes the seven communications on the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) issued between 2003 and 2013. These communications provide essential information regarding relations between the EU and its immediate neighbours. The textual analysis allows several relevant characteristics of discourses to be highlighted: stability and changes, actors, spaces and scales mentioned. The outcomes of the analysis confirm previous research on the subject: The ENP appears as a bilateral state-centric policy, missing global scale, and neglecting the role of regional powers like Turkey or Russia.
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| 5 |
ID:
142781
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| Summary/Abstract |
Since 2001, border security policy between Canada and the US has morphed from “smart borders” to the present “beyond the border” (perimeter security) agreement resulting in the expansion of new techniques of border surveillance including pre-emptive profiling of travellers and biometric data sharing. In this paper, we argue that these border agreements have increasingly resulted in a changing experience of sovereign power for those crossing the border. This is demonstrated through a discussion of: the major border policies between Canada and the US since 11 September 2001, developed under the influence of US hegemony; how these policies perpetrate a generalised state of exception; and how these policies affect refugees, migrants, and citizens. Reading Agamben’s insights from a sociological perspective, we argue that the presumption of security-through-surveillance erodes border crossers’ human rights, and that some people – those from disadvantaged race/class backgrounds – are more affected than others by the implementation of the evolving border regime. We also emphasise the contingencies and unintended consequences of the ongoing projects. The conclusion offers brief comments on the consequences of these developments on Canadian identity and points out the directions for future research in this domain.
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| 6 |
ID:
142770
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“Vietnam” connotes far more than it could ever denote, and yet it often connotes very little about Vietnam or the Vietnam War. Growing up in the United States during the era of what Vietnamese call the “American War,” I came to associate “Vietnam” with many things, almost none of them contributing to my enlightenment about Vietnam, its peoples, their histories, or the reasons for the military violence wracking the country from the time of my birth. To me, “Vietnam” implied deep social contention in the United States between the “hippy” antiwar protestors and the conservative Americans who felt the former to be unpatriotic; it implied an incomprehensible conflict between Asian forces, some of whose motivations were debated (often impugned as reflecting a strange fanaticism), and American forces whose motivations were similarly contestable; and it ultimately implied both political meltdown and military embarrassment for US forces and their allies. These perceptions, of course, were almost entirely US-centric, and while much of that US-centrism reflects my own upbringing, I believe it also accurately represents the ways “Vietnam” became part of the consciousness of most Americans, right up to the present.
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| 7 |
ID:
142777
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article sets a new agenda for research into the geopolitics of hotels. Moving beyond the study of hotels as neutral sites of leisure and tourism, hospitality mediated by financial exchange, we argue that hotels need to be researched as geopolitical sites. Hotel spaces – from conference rooms to reception halls, from hotel bars to corridors and private rooms – are connected to broader architectures of security and insecurity, war- and peacemaking. We present six themes for this research agenda: hotels as projections of soft power, soft targets for political violence, strategic infrastructures in conflict, hosts for war reporters, providers of emergency hospitality and care, and infrastructures of peace-building. We conclude that the geopolitical potential of hotels emerges from two spatial dimensions of the relation of hospitality: hotels’ selective openness and closure to their surroundings, and their flexible material infrastructures that can facilitate and mediate geopolitical processes. Research on geopolitics, and its engagements with the everyday materialities that shape war and peace, must take seriously the hotel as a geopolitical space.
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| 8 |
ID:
142778
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This article presents an analysis of the European Union and of the integration process using the concept of empire. It also offers a critical reflexion on the use of the concept of empire to analyse contemporary polities. It argues that many scholars of politics have a biased understanding of this concept, which is ‘tailored’ to analyse only one type of empire, the colonial empire, and to disregard the existence of another type of empire. To escape this trap, the article suggests the use of two concepts, ‘inwards imperial governance’ and ‘outwards imperial governance’. These concepts make it possible to account for different types of empire in the past as well as contemporary polities. They also help shed a different light on the EU’s empirehood and its evolution over time. In its concluding remarks, the article suggests the potential usefulness of these concepts for the analysis of other contemporary cases.
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| 9 |
ID:
142779
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| Summary/Abstract |
During the first half of the twentieth century, the river Rhine constituted the key source of insecurity between France and Germany. Contemporary observers have claimed that the river lost this role in the 1950s due to the dynamics of Franco-German rapprochement and the emergence of the European Coal and Steel Community. This article tries to complicate this story in three steps. First, it shifts attention from early European integration to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its role in the desecuritisation of the Rhine. Subsequently, it discusses the river’s loss of strategic significance in West Germany due to the particularities of post-war statehood and the country’s idiosyncratic geopolitics. Finally, the article argues that it was only the development of an independent French nuclear deterrent capacity between 1966 and 1972 that ultimately took the boundary from France’s geopolitical map.
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| 10 |
ID:
142772
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| Summary/Abstract |
On 17 April 1975 members of the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea entered Phnom Penh. Their arrival marked the culmination of years of revolution fighting, and a civil war that was embedded within the larger Second Indochina War. The victory of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK; better known as the Khmer Rouge) ushered a period of horrific proportions, as approximately one-quarter of Cambodia’s population died in less than four years. Roughly two million men, women, and children were killed either directly, by torture and execution, or indirectly, by disease, exhaustion or famine-related conditions.
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| 11 |
ID:
142769
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| Summary/Abstract |
This set of six short papers critically addresses the date of 30 April 2015, which marks the fortieth anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam – or what is often called the “fall of Saigon” in the United States – and the end of the war in Vietnam. This conflict is also called “American” war in Vietnam (chiến tranh chống Mỹ) and the “Second Indochina War” (1965–1975) because it more accurately conveys the war’s impact on the region surrounding Vietnam (and to distinguish it from the First Indochina War (1946–1954)). This collection arose from a panel session at the 2015 Association of American Geographers meeting in Chicago, Illinois, and brings together a mix of senior and junior geographers who work in and on mainland Southeast Asia development issues.
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| 12 |
ID:
142774
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| Summary/Abstract |
The fall of Saigon in 1975 set into motion a chain of events that eventually led to a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of peoples of different ethnicities from Laos into neighbouring Thailand. Most of these refugees eventually resettled in various countries, including the United States, France, Canada, Australia and others. One of these ethnic groups is the Hmong. The Vietnam War and its aftermath resulted in the splintering of the Hmong in Laos from a historically solidary ethnic group to one that is comprised of warring factions fuelled with mistrust and hatred that continue to resonate even today.
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| 13 |
ID:
142771
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Vietnam War, and its denouement, the fall of Saigon, was many things, but one, I will contend, was war by numbers. The American military in Vietnam based their strategies and campaigns in part on the collection and analysis of massive amounts of quantitative data. It was a war of big data before that term was coined. Necessarily, substantial use was made of that then recently invented machine par excellence of big data numerical calculation, the computer. IBM’s “Big Blue went to war” too.1 Paul Edwards2 maintains that the Vietnam War was the first to be fought on an “electronic battleground”. Von Clausewitz’s “fog of war” would lift, and the American military would see everything with perfect clarity from within their electronic “information panopticon”.3 How could America lose? But it did. In the end the numbers never added up.
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