Ghosts in the Delta
Usaid and the historical geographies of Vietnam's 'other' war
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4743973 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Wesley Attewell (0000-0003-4950-6443, Department of Geography, The University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 11 |
| Pages | 2257-2275 |
| Publication date | 2015-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1068/a140114p |
| OpenAlex | W2287225886 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
| References cited | 28 |
This paper will provide historical and geographical nuance to Eyal Weizman's concept of the 'humanitarian present' through an interrogation of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) entanglement in Cold War counterinsurgency. Specifically, it focuses on Cold War Vietnam, where USAID, through its Offices of Rural Affairs and Public Safety, spearheaded the 'other' war for rural 'hearts and minds' through two distinct, yet related, suites of spatial interventions. First, it sought to indirectly 'conduct the conduct' of the South Vietnamese people by providing technical assistance and commodity support to the Strategic Hamlet and Revolutionary Development programs. USAID's counterinsurgency programming, however, was not only traversed by a 'will to improve': it was also marked by a 'will to police'. Here, I am specifically referring to the central role that USAID's Office of Public Safety played in helping the government of South Vietnam establish a functioning National Police whose 'internal security' mandate eventually encompassed both a biopolitics of population control as well as a necropolitics of neutralization. Over the course of this essay I will theorize these two tracks of counterinsurgency programming as the Janus faces of a broader 'war-police' nexus geared towards catalyzing the fabrication of a modern social order in the Vietnamese countryside
Economic growth · International development · International relations · Mandate · Political science · Politics · Population · Social science · Sociology · Vietnam War · Vietnamese · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Global Security and Public Health · Law · Public Administration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
The Gaza Strip
The Will to Improve
The Liberal Way of War
Time in the Shadows
Geographical imaginations
War Power, Police Power
The Fabrication of Social Order
Development, Security and Unending War, Governing the World of Peoples
Praxis in the Time of Empire
The Least of All Possible Evils
The millennium challenge account
On Theory and Method
Redirecting the revolution? The USA and the failure of nation-building in South Vietnam
Productive War
The Perfect War
An Illustration of Geographical Warfare
Figuring the Prison
Damming Afghanistan
Humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic
Militant tropicality
Geographical Warfare in the Tropics
Modernizing Repression
Seeing Red
The Liberal War Thesis
Colonial Governmentality
Necropolitics
Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,82 |
| Citation span | 2015 - 2021 (7) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 9 |