National Reconstruction of Colonial Territory in Southeast Asia

This seminar examines diplomatic relations between Indonesia and the two Vietnams from 1955 to 1965. During this period, political leaders sought to free their countries from colonial rule while simultaneously pursuing control over territories whose borders had been defined by former colonial powers.

Indonesia, North Vietnam and South Vietnam all sent delegates to the 1955 Asian–African Conference in Bandung and embraced its principles of self-determination, anticolonialism and equality among nations. Yet their subsequent diplomatic, political and military actions show how these same principles were also used to legitimize territorial conquest.

Presented as projects of “national reunification”, these efforts aimed to create unified national territories that had not previously existed in that form. By examining Indonesia and the two Vietnams together, the paper shows how the Bandung principles extended beyond anticolonial solidarity and could become instruments of what Lentz terms postcolonial recolonization.

About the speaker

Christian C. Lentz is Associate Professor of Geography and Environment and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (Yale University Press, 2019), which received the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize for an outstanding first book in Southeast Asian studies. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Political Geography, Modern Asian Studies, American Historical Review and other journals. He has held fellowships through the Fulbright Program in Vietnam, at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His current research examines territory, nationalism and decolonization in Indonesia and the two Vietnams.

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