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Abstract

The Vietnam War is one of the most profound episodes to occur in the twentieth century yet geography’s influence on appraising the conflict is scarcely known inside the discipline and typically ignored outside of it. This paper responds to these issues by presenting three concepts on the global nature of the war: territory, circuitry, and memory. Moving beyond the myth of a singular Vietnam and United States, my argument centers on the global Vietnam War, leading to clarity about what geography has accomplished in advancing a wider spatial-temporal understanding of the war. The conclusion critiques geography’s gaps concerning the war.

Keywords

circuitry global imperialism justice memory territory Vietnam War

Introduction

This paper seeks to understand how geographical thinking fits into what is unquestionably one of the flashpoints of the global twentieth century, the Vietnam War, or the “American War” in Vietnamese (kháng chiến chống Mỹ)¹. The fiftieth anniversary of the formal end of the war, which arrived on April 30, 2025, was enthusiastically celebrated in Vietnam as a reminder of the “David versus Goliath” triumph over a global superpower (Cave, 2025), while in the United States, the war was the subject of fleeting hand-wringing (Philipps, 2025). But it is misleading to assume that the United States engaged in military conflict with a singular Vietnam from 1963 to 1975 and to say that the “end of the Vietnam War” arrived on April 30, 2025: the position I take in what follows is that in geographers’ hands the Vietnam War is first and foremost a global war featuring the United States, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam with strands extending throughout East and Southeast Asia, as well as interest from governments in the Global North². Geographers have also advanced debates defying any clear start and finish to the conflict, with the war reverberating deeply even today (e.g., Gillen, 2018; Glassman, 2015). A reframing of the war—including its scale, impact, and longevity—is thus necessary, particularly as unhelpful falsehoods about winners and losers and start and stop dates are perpetuated by the US and Vietnamese governments, as well as the press around the world.

Reframing the war is an important exercise to conduct because geographers have been engaged with research about the globalization of the Vietnam War for decades with barely a glance from cognate fields undertaking compatible research in the social sciences and humanities. There is therefore an overdue need for a long durée stock-taking of geographical contributions to understanding the conflict, especially in relation to the subjects of warfare, imperialism, and justice. The half-century since it ended has arguably cemented the Vietnam War even further into the global psyche than when it unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s. The conflict is pointed to as a lynchpin of the Cold War (Glassman, 2009; Hansson et al., 2020; Linantud, 2008; Whyte, 2018) and continues to shape international relations between the United States and Asian governments (Glassman, 2005); it features in the never-ending battles between imperial and anticolonial powers (Bowd and Clayton, 2013; Clayton, 2013; Clayton and Kumar, 2019; Harvey, 2004; Power, 2001); and it is a moment that some critics believe triggered an upending of the global order, facilitating Asia’s rise and the decline of the West (Mahbubani, 2015, 2023). The Vietnam War is regularly brought up in relation to ongoing wars of occupation, including between Russia and Ukraine (Dror, 2022; Mearsheimer, 2022) and Israel and Gaza (Wines, 2023). Said succinctly Vietnam lives on as an independent, unified nation and an idea underpinning global debates over power, geopolitics, sovereignty, modernity, development, war, suffering, and dislocation. Geography is a discipline dedicated to tracing war (Barnes and Farish, 2006), peace (Megoran, 2011; Woon, 2014), violence (Fluri, 2022), and the long tendrils of war’s aftermath (Kirsch and Flint, 2011) so my larger aim is to link geographical thinking on the Vietnam War to broader debates about conflict and power worldwide (for a historian’s take on conflict and power in the globalization of the Vietnam War see L-HT Nguyen, 2012; in political science see Vu, 2017).

This paper seeks to accomplish the above goals by presenting three topics core to the Vietnam War in the geographical canon, broadly defined: territory, circuitry, and memory. The three topics are chosen because they are prominently addressed in geography and also significant in the social sciences and humanities. But geographers and their intellectual counterparts in other disciplines often seem to be ships passing in the night: social scientists and those in the humanities utilize concepts and tools borrowed from geography to better understand the war in its evental, societal, and ideological forms but only rarely include research from geography in the debates (Clemis, 2018, 2025). Likewise geographers consistently do not register work by historians, anthropologists, diaspora researchers, and environmentalists of the Vietnam War who have centered their studies on ideas and methods core to geography (e.g., Biggs, 2018a; Goscha, 2012; Schwenkel, 2017). This paper addresses missed opportunities for a fuller synthesis by bringing geographers in to deeper conversation with bodies of literature on the Vietnam War. Taking the point a step further, connecting the terms territory, circuitry, and memory favored in geography to the extensive debates surrounding war, imperialism, and justice, respectively I want to more deeply embed the geographies of the Vietnam War in to cross-cutting research in the social sciences and humanities. My biggest intended take-away for this paper is to push forward a different conceptualization of the Vietnam War that globalizes it by extending the spatial-temporality of the “Vietnam War” beyond Vietnam and United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

The next section narrates a history of the Vietnam War with a focus on the fifty years following Vietnam’s reunification. In both research and the popular imagination the Vietnam War is fought “first on the battlefield and the second time in memory,” to paraphrase Viet Thanh Nguyen’s resonant statement about the magnitude of Vietnam on the world’s collective consciousness and the foolishness of calling the war “finished” in 1975 (Nguyen, 2016). In this section I present the argument inflected throughout the rest of the article that the “Vietnam War” includes a vast array of nations, stakeholders, and interests apart from Vietnam and the United States. Importantly this move does not discount the primacy of these nations in the conflict but widens, or globalizes, the dialogue to uncover some important dimensions occluded as observers train their focus on Vietnam and the United States.

The subsequent section brings Vietnam War territoriality to bear on war’s geographies. This part of the paper highlights how geographical interest in the landscapes, borders, and environments of post-war Vietnam and Southeast Asia speaks to the commonalities of the conflict’s reproduction in and beyond the nation-state. Next I outline how geography’s interest in “circuits” (e.g., logistics, datafication, and computation) is a component of research surrounding imperialism. The question of how intelligence and technology contributes to imperialist agendas by nations and related global alliances is addressed in this section. The following section reflects on geographical attention to memory and links it to justice. Understanding how the hauntings of the Vietnam War can be situated within ongoing research on justice brings the various permutations of “Vietnam” in to dialogue with present concerns about accountability and memorialization occurring after the end of war. The conclusion summarizes the paper’s arguments and points to gaps in research on the Vietnam War that geographers have thus far missed and would be well-equipped to participate in filling.

Globalizing Vietnam and the Vietnam War

The Vietnamese and American governments agree that the Vietnam War officially finished on April 30, 1975, when North Vietnam (formally the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, DRV) took control of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam, or RVN) and unified the country along communist lines. Otherwise known as the Second Indochina War in the academic literature (Laderman and Martini, 2013) the Vietnam War pitted Soviet and Chinese-backed Communist North Vietnam against South Vietnam, a then sovereign and democratic nation which was supported by American, Korean, Australian, Thai, Filipino, and New Zealand forces. North Vietnam was also buoyed by the National Liberation Front, pejoratively called the Viet Cong, a group that was vital to waging battles within South Vietnam. This list of participants illustrates the extent of global involvement in the Vietnam War and emphasizes the complex entanglements of Western and communist-aligned ideologies that shaped the war. But it is also critical to note that the “Vietnam War” is a misnomer because misery extended throughout Southeast Asia: Cambodia (see Tyner, 2015) and Laos (see Baird, 2015) incurred extraordinary destruction to their people and environments in the name of attacks on North Vietnamese allies across national borders; likewise Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong and later Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States (among others) were brought in to the war by virtue of displaced populations arriving in these countries after fleeing violence in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (VT Nguyen, 2012). The global extent of the war is a bedrock for the arguments I take up below.

In questioning the purportedly clearly demarcated temporal boundaries of 1963 and 1975 Vietnamese studies scholars argue that the Second Indochina War (the “Vietnam War” in common usage) should be directly linked to earlier Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian resistance to colonial France, also known as the First Indochina War (Asselin, 2024; Goscha, 2016; Lentz, 2015). The use of “Indochina” in both the first and second “Indochinese” wars indicates that war extended to Vietnam’s western neighbors, or the area then known as French Indochina (Goscha, 2012; Lentz, 2025). France’s colonization of modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 1800s began to fall after its defeat by Vietnamese military groups at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, in 1954, which then led to an ungainly separation between communist North Vietnam and democratic South Vietnam along the 17^th Parallel in the center of modern-day Vietnam (Goscha, 2022). The establishment of the 17^th Parallel in 1954 facilitated eventual war between North Vietnamese forces and the militaries led by the United States and South Vietnam, the latter of which were publicly concerned about the spread of communism in North Vietnam and throughout Southeast Asia (Asselin, 2024; L-HT Nguyen, 2012).

Despite the United States government’s overwhelming intelligence, firepower, and willpower aimed at stemming communism in Southeast Asia by supporting the retention of South Vietnam’s fledgling democracy, as of 2025 a unified Vietnam continues to be run by a one-party, communist-controlled government (Hayton, 2010). Laos is also avowedly communist while Cambodia is comfortably authoritarian (Baird, 2025; Norén-Nilsson, 2022). Critics on both the left and the right still debate over whether the United States “lost” the Vietnam War, or even lost Asia to communist inclinations, but there is no doubt that the tremendous loss of life among Vietnamese, Cambodians, Lao, and Hmong constitutes one of the most violent and tragic episodes of the twentieth century (Miller, 2016). As a result of the Vietnam War the United States reckons with its own human, military, morale, and leadership losses to this day (see Ward, 2017).

All of this to say that the fifty years of distance between the formal end of the war and today has done little to settle the demons of the conflict, including those in Southeast Asia and its diasporic communities which continue to suffer from the war’s onslaught by way of sustained environmental damage, loss of family and friends, and forced migration. The war is still raised by governments and their militaries involved in the war (Melanson, 2016) and those that were not direct contributors (Llewelyn, 2011). Global audiences consume stories in dozens of languages offering perspectives from many corners of the war. These have been popularized in English-language films recounting the Vietnam War (among others Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Da Five Bloods, Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Good Morning Vietnam, Platoon, and We Were Soldiers) and in novels and biographies. Notably none of the innumerable popular outlets narrating the Vietnam War are neutral which has led filmgoers, readers, and critics to form their own opinions about the motivations, implementation, and aftermath of the war (Nguyen, 2015). The disparities about what happened and what could have been done differently³ influences contemporary domestic and foreign policy, military action, diplomatic alliances, personal relationships, and citizenship in countless ways.

After decades of willful repression and collective ignorance contributions about the war and its repercussions have finally been put in the hands of the millions of Vietnamese participants, bystanders, refugees, and victims whose torment about the conflict remains (e.g., Espiritu et al., 2022). Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (1993) is the most renowned novel about the war written in Vietnamese while Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is essential reading to understand the enduring plight of Vietnamese refugees catapulted in to new lives overseas (1989). There are hundreds of additional examples that have pushed the war past the limited domain of Anglo and Western voices (see Boyle and Lim, 2016; Peché et al., 2023). The Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong diasporas have firmly established themselves as beacons for understanding how war exacts violence, displacement, and the mutilation of one’s body, kinship, and identity well after the formal conclusion of the conflict in Southeast Asia (Ngô et al., 2012). Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novels, autobiography, essays, and academic articles are perhaps the most well-known accounts from a Vietnamese refugee writing at the juncture of war and memory (Nguyen, 2015) but academic and popular works are replete with reflections on the links and breaks associated with being an overseas Vietnamese, or who Vietnamese nationals call “Việt kiều” (e.g., Bui, 2018).

Over the past fifty years geography’s contributions to the idea of “the Vietnam War” have been split between varied critiques of the US’s misguided, violent approach to battling communism in Vietnam and the Asia-Pacific (Attewell, 2024; Gregory, 2016; Lacoste, 1973; Shaw, 2016) and to capturing the scale and lasting impacts of the war around the world (Glassman, 2015; Vue, 2015). Investigations in to the Vietnam War from the perspective of the nation of Vietnam itself are rare and dotted in haphazard fashion throughout a range of human geography and congruous outlets (see Gillen, 2011, 2014); as shown below, the aftermath of the Vietnam War on Cambodia commands more attention than Vietnam (see Tyner and colleagues’ work referenced in this paper), with some studies about post-war Laos also appearing (e.g., Baird, 2015). Looking beyond the former Indochinese countries reveals the global connections between the fighting and direct loss of life that took place in Southeast Asia and the uneven, bumpy development path forward in East Asia that was supported by US military industrial complex interests (see Glassman, 2018). Documenting geographers’ interest in the territorialization, circuitries, and memory-making of the global Vietnam War is a means of furthering pressing interdisciplinary scholarly concerns with war, imperialism, and justice.

Territory and war

Clashes over territory—“a sociospatial strategy or technique for simplifying and clarifying the operations of power” (Delaney, 2009: 196)—regularly escalate to global wars. One prominent indicator warring powers use to gauge success and failure is the extent of control over territory. As geographers have illustrated, territory and war inhabit a dynamically integrated relationship made explicit in the era of the nation-state (Cowen and Gilbert, 2008). Beyond the “where” of territorial expansion/reduction brought on by conflict, geographical scholarship on the intersection of territory and war has much to tell us about the how tyrannical power plays out globally, whether by means of controlling land, earth, air, space, resources, or human beings (Flint, 2005). In the twentieth century, the majority of this desire for territorial control was initiated by hegemons in the Global North and in its quest to secure and project “American exceptionalism,” the US specifically (Agnew, 1983; Mercille, 2008). Control over territory during the Vietnam War was variously measured according to number of “enemy” kills, defense of the 17th Parallel separating North and South Vietnam, resource depletion, and the breadth of bombing areas vital to North Vietnamese lifelines, including the astonishing volume of bombs dropped in Laos and Cambodia to eliminate Viet Cong and sympathizers (High et al., 2013; Shaw, 2016).

The first foray in English and French analyzing how territory was transformed by the Vietnam War occurred before the clash ended. In 1973 French geographer Yves Lacoste described how American and South Vietnamese geographical knowledge, and specifically geographers’ cartographic abilities, contributed to the massive 1972 bombing campaign of North Vietnamese dike systems which killed thousands and disrupted livelihoods in areas thought to be aligned with the communists. Joining together an indispensable if horrific set of maps outlining the extent of the bombing with unflinching critical analysis, Lacoste (1973: 3) argued that “those who did design the strategy and tactics of bombing, demonstrated a powerful mastery of geographical information and geographical thinking.” Lacoste’s paper was a revelation to geography because it combined a depth of map interpretation expertise with richly developed analytic skills necessary to make damning judgments on the United States’ war machine. The implication for the discipline is that Lacoste trained his criticisms squarely on how professional geographers use their expertise in cartography and map reading to unleash death and destruction on behalf of the United States military. The war-induced annihilation of territory, in other words, is not just a matter for geographers to research but a way for geography’s techniques to be utilized among colonial and imperial powers (Bowd and Clayton, 2013). Subsequent scholarship has illustrated how geographical tools buttress American invasions in the Middle East (Elden, 2009; Morrissey, 2011; Smith, 1992) which have in turn spawned debates about the role of geographical knowledge and instruments in American militarism and war-making (see the Beck/O’Loughlin/Shroder debates: Beck, 2005; O’Loughlin, 2005; Shroder, 2005; and the Wainwright and Weaver debates: Wainwright and Weaver, 2021; Rose-Redwood et al., 2022; and see Wainwright, 2016).

Recent studies have seen geographers and historians follow Lacoste’s intervention by incorporating social theories of territory in to American military environmental narratives about Vietnam during war undertakings there. Clayton introduced the concept of “militant tropicality” to examine the US government’s Orientalist discourses advancing the use of force against North Vietnam (2013). Arguing that “American geopolitical and military discourse had long been imbued with environmental assumptions about how climatic extremes of cold and hot mapped on to binaries of good and evil, progress and backwardness” (ibid., p. 185), Clayton highlights concerns from the Kennedy administration and US military leadership over what they believed were the “unconventional” facets of warfare in Vietnam, showing how the US framed the challenges to fighting in Vietnam as being unique to an undeveloped, hot, jungle, and opaque fighting environment unconducive to “traditional” ground war. Making use of US Armed Forces manuals and directives Clayton points out “that the ‘thorough’ and ‘unexpected’ use that the Viet Cong made of the tropical environment was a key ‘obstacle’ to American combat effectiveness and placed a ‘hypnotic spell’ on the ‘physical resolve’ and ‘mental discipline’ of US troops” (ibid., p. 187; citing United States Army, 1965, 31, p. 136).

Gregory (2016) reinforces Clayton’s arguments in his discussion about the role of nature in Vietnam during the war. He uses the memoirs of US soldiers to illustrate the threat and possibilities inherent to the Vietnamese environment, which would “exact a toll for every ounce….carried” (ibid., p. 26) but also served as an “alibi for atrocity…so that those who committed acts of indiscriminate or unnecessary violence believed they had somehow been reduced to a ‘state of nature’ by nature” (Gregory, 2016: 35, italics Gregory’s). In Clayton and Gregory’s readings the US’s Orientalist conceptualization of Vietnamese territory made it at once threatening and ripe for conquering through force.

Writing in a granular style historian David Biggs uses critical cartography, satellite imagery, remote sensing, US military records, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) data to map the debasement of Vietnam’s territory during the war (2018a; 2018b; 2018c, and see Aso, 2018; Biggs, 2012). If Clayton and Gregory’s objects under scrutiny are policies, directives, and personal accounts then Biggs’ are maps. Biggs develops the term “militarized landscapes” to argue that the US’s depiction of vast “empty” spaces under intense bombardment and dioxins were in fact well populated villages and ancestral communities essential to the lifeforce of local inhabitants. Importantly the long tail of US incursions on the Vietnamese environment is also addressed in Biggs’ research when he outlines the ongoing, ever-present damages of the Agent Orange herbicide on groundwater quality and the health of populations exposed to it in the years following the formal conclusion of the war (2018c).

Another pertinent body of critical geographical scholarship surrounding territorial transformation in war relates to the promulgation of genocide by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (Tyner, 2016, 2017, 2021, 2023). In this research the everyday difficulties accessing food, water, and shelter following the formal conclusion of the war in Cambodia were compounded by the conversion of its citizens in to a productive labor force instructed to serve the demands of an oppressive, genocidal regime bent on creating a collectivist national political economy (Tyner, 2014; Tyner and Rice, 2016). The US’s incessant bombing of a politically neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam War in the name of rooting out Viet Cong insurgents and others loyal to communism facilitated political instability, intensifying a civil war that opened space for Pol Pot and the ruling Khmer Rouge to exact unrelenting violence on Cambodian environments and society (Kiernan, 1996).

In terms of territory what Clayton, Gregory, and Tyner and his collaborators sketch is that war is never squarely confined to national borders nor does it have clear start and end dates, as much of the public assumes was the case in the Vietnam War. Moreover Tyner and his co-authors show how the pursuit of territory through conflict should not solely be framed in terms of Global North versus Global South, East versus West, developed versus underdeveloped, colonial versus colonized, political versus economic (e.g., Tyner, 2024; Tyner and Rice, 2022; Tyner, 2014; Tyner et al., 2014). Expanding understandings of territory and war outside of these tropes deepens and augments both terms and their intersections.

How else can geographical research on the territorial impacts of the Vietnam War advance war studies? Many have established a connection between America’s preoccupation with the number of enemy kills and territorial gain during their fighting in Vietnam and similar accounting by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq (Dumbrell and Ryan, 2007; Gregory, 2004; Young, 2007). Harnessing extant debates about the intersection of territory and war, the use of technologies such as GIS, remote sensing, and database analysis to critically assess territorial transformation in Vietnam and Southeast Asia (Biggs, 2018a; High et al., 2013) could further document and analyze modern-day warfare initiated by the United States and other belligerents. Work on the everyday transformation of Vietnamese villages brought on by bombing, clearing, and “soft power” projects like pamphleting (Kocher et al., 2011) would aid researchers studying conflict in the Korean peninsula (see Cumings, 2010), Palestine, and Ukraine, to name three. Studies of the forced movement of Vietnamese refugees during war has reimagined space, place, identity, and belonging (Bui, 2018; Espiritu et al., 2022; VT Nguyen, 2012), and these works are able to contribute to ongoing considerations of involuntary migration in the Middle East and Europe following the wars in Palestine and Ukraine, respectively.

Circuitry and imperialism

One of the contributions of the geography literature on the Vietnam War is to expose the inner-workings of what may be called the “nuts and bolts” of American military interests in Vietnam, that of war’s circuitry (Attewell, 2020, 2024; Barnes, 2015; Belcher, 2016, 2019; Hansson et al., 2020; Shaw, 2016). By circuitry I mean the web of infrastructure, materiel, statistics, figures, information, and logistics without which there could be no heartbeat of military presence in Vietnam. Rarely featuring in popular representations of the war the back-end supply chain management, predictive modeling and forecasting, data crunching, and movement of bodies in and out of Southeast Asia established by the US military industrial complex prolonged the war and in its breadth and depth war circuitry ripples through Vietnamese society today (Biggs, 2018a; 2018b). Additionally what geographers and others illustrate about the Vietnam War’s circuitry is how it facilitated a way for the United States to build post-Cold War imperial links in Asia via technology’s prospect for a more “modern” future in the region, one that the American government, contractors, and multinational corporations were interested in being a part of (Barnes and Farish, 2006; Glassman, 2005; Hansson et al., 2020). This work brings to the fore the close relationship between circuity, imperialism, and capitalist extraction in war time and its long aftermath.

A first sub-body of research on circuitry in geography examines how crucial the production of massive amounts of data during the Vietnam War was for the Americans when they went about justifying the war’s human and financial expenditure. A dark undercurrent in this body of work is that producing reams of information was seen as a way to abstract the conflict and mitigate questions about the war’s moral, physical, and human costs. “A war of big data before the term was coined” (Barnes, 2015: 736), the Vietnam War was an intensification of metrics-led American military interventions that had long been a core part of American incursions overseas (see Belcher, 2016: 130, and see Belcher, 2019). Utilizing the latest in computational methods, quantifiable representations of the Vietnam War directed the conflict toward “objectives” underpinned by statistical evidence. With regular reports of bombing accuracy, win-loss records on the battlefield, and number of enemy kills the Vietnam War could be framed in competitive, game-like terms impressive to US government officials intent on “tangible” gains and resonant with an American public accustomed to sporting metaphors to measure success and loss in global conflict. Barnes and Belcher’s research makes clear that the production of data and information allowed the US military to disassociate itself from being held accountable to loss of life, morale, and morality as the war moved forward.

Attewell’s research tracks efforts undertaken by the US military and allied groups (such as the United States Agency for International Aid (USAID)) to underline the relationship between circuitry and imperialism (2024; 2021; 2020). He draws from Cowen (2014) in describing logistics as a tool of imperialism and violence, one that in the same spirit as Barnes and Belcher’s understanding is “data-driven” in nature (Attewell, 2021: 1336). In his work Attewell points out that logistics is potent because it has a longer lifespan and a more soft power temperament than the brute force of the US military machinery or the distractedness and missteps of American intelligence. Laying down communication channels such as telephone cables, transportation infrastructure like roads, canals, and airports, and pouring food, medicine, and arms in to Vietnam accomplished more than brokering the unyielding military campaign against North Vietnam and guerrilla movements; it also ensured a capitalist foundation was set for the US to establish closer economic relationships with South Vietnam, American allies participating in the war, and a global web of contractors tasked with creating an imprint in Southeast Asia. Attewell summarizes the logistics project when he argues that “imperial logisticians played a central, yet overlooked role in the pacification of the Communist insurgency, laying down the transportation and distribution infrastructures necessary to manage and reorganize the life needs of local populations. Imperial logisticians envisioned these infrastructures supporting an eventual peacetime transition toward liberal, capitalist futures” (ibid., p. 1329).

Attewell further translates the darling of global business management strategy narratives, just-in-time production, in to a term applicable to the circuits developed behind the scenes of the US-driven military campaign, what he calls “just-in-time imperialism” (ibid.). Just-in-time imperialism is insightful because it signals a motivation beyond political freedom for the US’s stated interest to protect South Vietnam from communism. The thinking goes that if the whole of Vietnam were to fall to communism and the domino theory of communist takeover of Southeast Asia were to take shape (Jackson, 2009), then the US would have far fewer opportunities to facilitate the bolstering of global capital with itself in control (Attewell, 2020: 912). In Attewell’s research, America’s interest in decolonizing Vietnam (and the Pacific) had the benefit of integrating Southeast Asia more fully in to the global economy. “Ironically,” he goes on to say about the failure of this vital component of the Vietnam War, “it was the North Vietnamese regime that assumed control over the logistics infrastructures that US occupying forces left behind after the fall of Saigon” (Attewell, 2021: 1331).

Additionally, Attewell’s work ties American war-making in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s to a broader statement about logistics’ importance to the post-war development industry when he explains how US interests negotiated with emerging Pacific rim economies “by offering them preferential integration within a globalizing military-industrial-development complex” (ibid., p. 1332). Moreover “the US negotiation strategy was to pitch militarized development as an accelerated pathway to industrialization and modernization” (ibid.). In this view American allies such as South Korea and Japan were promised a seat on board the neoliberal development bandwagon if they assisted in constructing the military logistics infrastructure the US demanded. Led by continuing American interests in having quick, efficient access to resources in Asia-Pacific the militarized entanglements between America and its allies are most fully expressed in American military bases dotting the Asia-Pacific region (Woodward, 2004), but geographers have also been keen to explore how the capitalist-centric tentacles born out of the ashes of the Vietnam War appear in industrial zones co-designed by the United States and South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand, among other participants (Glassman, 2018).

The contemporary links between American military hegemony and Asian development during the Cold War are in part an outcome of relationships strengthened from shared goals during the Vietnam War (Barnes and Farish, 2006; Elliott, 2012; Glassman, 2005). Those governments and corporations on board with combating communism were incentivized to join the United States cause by way of massive aid packages to rapidly infuse their military and industrial markets. The partnerships that transpired made inseparable the blood of war and the exploitation of labor and resources in the global economy, with circuitry providing the groundwork for both. In particular and in exchange for an even deeper economic partnership with the United States, South Korea took the bait and sent more ground troops to fight alongside the Americans than any other country (Glassman and Choi, 2014) which then facilitated Korea’s much lauded pivot from authoritarian state to “Asian tiger.” For Hansson et al., aligning with “anti-communism meant support for modernization underpinned by market-friendly capitalism” (2020, p. 495) and “justified state violence” (ibid., p. 497). A summary of these collective arguments is that the United States looked past ground and air combat when creating circuitry to aid the war effort; they also envisioned longer-term economic opportunity that “swung political and economic power in favor of capitalist classes and their states” (ibid., p. 500).

The arguments showcased in this section explore the inextricable links between the circuitry of war and the US’s imperialist intentions, and how circuits developed during the Vietnam War lumps the United States among the imperial powers of the twentieth century. Although this research is essential for understanding the Vietnam War, from a geographical perspective there are further opportunities to connect with aligned research in critical human geography. One possibility is to take the findings from Belcher, Barnes, and Attewell about the production of information by the US military and bring them in to dialogue with big data and war studies. A research group led by human geographers and peace studies scholars, the Armed Conflict Location and Events Database (ACLED) compiles, maps, and analyzes conflict worldwide but has not yet engaged with war in Southeast Asia (Raleigh et al., 2010). Doing so would provide comparative opportunities between the Vietnam War and more contemporary conflicts and may also shed further light on the civil war dimensions of the Vietnam War routinely ignored in geography (Goscha, 2016).

Moreover, there are fascinating links between the isolationist and populist currents emerging today and the post-Cold War “us versus them” mentality that dictates foreign policy. These days a powerful group of “non-Western” governments such as Russia, China, India, and even Vietnam are regularly meeting, trading, providing territory for military bases, and selling arms to each other under the explicit directive to facilitate a pan-Asian milieu and combat Western influence (Winter, 2020). Meanwhile Western powers seem fragmented and more interested in withdrawing from globalization, broadly defined (e.g., Warf, 2021). In my reading the Vietnam War precipitated sharp divisions around the world the parameters of which are still being negotiated in the early twenty-first century through competing organizations like the G7, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Looking more closely in to how the geopolitical tensions of today were born out of the scars of the Vietnam War is one potentially vibrant research pathway for geographers to engage in going forward.

As a coda it is salient to mention that this section features research disproportionately generated by geographers identifying as male who are working in or who have trained at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver Canada, and I return to this point, and the implications for feminist critiques of the spectacle of war, in the conclusion.

Memory and justice

This penultimate section outlines how the Vietnam War is carried forward through the landscapes and lives of those who experienced its many dimensions. In human geography and companion fields the majority of work done on war remembrance from the Vietnam War era is constructed using examples from Southeast Asia rather than from the United States or other allied nations in the West (e.g., Hughes, 2008, though see Gillen, 2011, 2014, 2021). As I discuss in a moment, one analytic outcome of research on Southeast Asian memorial sites is how international tourists use their exhibits to point out the ongoing neediness and backwardness of the region. Another aspect of Vietnam War memory studies in geography centers on unearthing how commemoration becomes a vehicle to enact justice for the people, environments, and structures affected by the war. Like territory and circuitry human geography’s treatment of the memorialization of the Vietnam War encourages a global view of the conflict that goes beyond the territorial borders of the United States and Vietnam and beyond the official conclusion of the conflict in 1975.

The landscapes of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are dotted with physical memorials of the Vietnam War, some conveyed through artistic impressions, others through violent reenactments of war, and still others hewing to a more calming, reflective narrative (Baird and Le Billon, 2012; Henkin, 2018; Schwenkel, 2017; Tai, 2001). Writings from geographers about Vietnam’s reckoning with the memory of the conflict are scant (but see Gillen, 2014) though in taking a broader and deeper approach to the war Cambodia features prominently in “Vietnam War” memory studies. Two of the most conspicuous in the Cambodian landscape are commodified dark tourism sites primarily designed for tourists: the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in central Phnom Penh and the Choeung Ek “killing fields,” about an hour drive outside of the capital (Bennett, 2018; Hughes, 2003; Tyner and Devadoss, 2014). These sites are unabashedly “politicized and commodified memorial sites of violence” (Tyner et al., 2012: 854) that further the current Cambodian government’s interest in distinguishing the horrors of the past Khmer Rouge era with the modern-day, forward-focused regime led by a Khmer Rouge defector, Hun Sen, and more recently his son Hun Manet (Norén-Nilsson, 2022).

Geographers working in the Global North studying these two sites tend to circle around how narratives at the memorials have been appropriated by tourists to reproduce the Western saviour/Asian supplicant binary. Tuol Sleng, Hughes argues, is a site that triggers “the shuttling from a tourist subjectivity to that of a humanitarian actor (and) is common among travelers in Cambodia, and is often associated with the imaginary of Cambodia as an impoverished place” (2008, p. 327). The focus on attracting foreign tourists via the Khmer Rouge genocide, in other words, shifts control over Cambodian-led memories to depictions produced by Western tourists. Moreover both Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are notable for ignoring the impact of the American bombing campaign in Cambodia during the global Vietnam War on the emergence of the Khmer Rouge (Tyner, 2016). What emerges from studies by geographers and others studying Tuol Sleng and “the killing fields’”⁴ as tourist sites is how justice becomes a fleeting object of interest for visitors instead keen to “help” fix and improve Cambodia (Hughes, 2008). Narratives of justice shaped by Cambodian victims are marginalized at Tuol Sleng and Cheuong Ek, rendering their value in effectively memorializing the American bombing campaign of the country and the subsequent Cambodian genocide an open question.

Utilizing war crime tribunals as a means of translating memory and trauma in to justice figures in the legal geographical scholarship on the Vietnam War. Key to these debates is an examination of the distinctions between Western dominated global legal systems and citizen-driven legal undertakings established in Vietnam and Cambodia during the war and after fighting ceased, respectively. An example drawn from Vietnam is the Russell Tribunal, a people-led war crimes court organized by the European academic-activists Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to investigate the US and its allies “for breaches of international law committed in the region” as they were unfolding in the late 1960s in Vietnam (Boyle and Kobayashi, 2015: 702).

Boyle and Kobayashi position the Russell Tribunal as a way to understand how a groundswell search for justice breaks from the legal parameters of the top-down, US-driven global criminal justice system such that people-led war crime tribunals “serve as historically novel instruments through which concerned citizens can speak subaltern moral and legal truth to power” (ibid., p. 698). Arguing that “there exists a fundamental incommensurability between international law and subaltern ethics” (ibid.) the authors make the case that Russell Tribunal, despite not being legally binding under the norms of international law, is a channel for exploring people-led war crime tribunals’ “potential to serve as an instrument through which to seek a just justice for those wronged by colonial and neocolonial subjugations” (ibid., p. 701). The Russell Tribunal’s launch at the peak of the war meant that its creators were concerned that waiting to operationalize justice until the formal conclusion of war would further punish those who have to relive the memories of their suffering as they concurrently go about rebuilding themselves and their communities, with the lag also arguably weakening the potency of the violence they experienced when shared publicly. Pushing people-led war crime tribunals to be litigated in the midst of war is also a moral and democratic requirement that responds to citizen demands for justice to be meted out in a timely fashion.

Further to the memory and justice debates in geography Hughes continues her research about the Khmer Rouge by assessing the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a war crimes tribunal that in the early 2000s brought together Cambodian victims with the United Nations to put Khmer Rouge leaders on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity (Hughes, 2015). Responding to international media’s claim that the long planned, expensive, and bureaucratically unwieldy process amounted to a “show trial”, Hughes argues that war crimes tribunals must have a performative nature in order to unquestionably demonstrate that justice must “not only be done, but be seen to be done” (ibid., p. 724) to effectively pass judgment, secure global consensus, and express the severity of the crimes to a worldwide audience. Additionally, Hughes illustrates that war crimes trials such as the ECCC—which was undertaken almost 30 years after the regime was formally toppled—are sites of critical memory work that push back on the notion that “a homogenous Cambodia (is) largely disconnected from contemporary elsewhere, not simply ‘behind’ the developed world and mired in a traumatic and violent past, but thirsting for justice and unlikely to get it” (ibid.). Why, she insinuates in her arguments, does the West and its machinations get to stand up theatrical trials against its leaders (e.g., Trump, Clinton, Milošević, and Eichmann) while a citizenry like Cambodia must continue to suffer silently, in essence remaining paralyzed to the past? The authors of both the Russell Tribunal and the ECCC examples also put forward the argument that there is a double standard to what the West counts as crimes against humanity; this double standard is extended to show how war and genocidal injustices raised by those in power the West are resisted when similar claims are highlighted by people in countries like Vietnam and Cambodia, and who are sympathetic to their travails. Turning a “blind eye of justice” toward the United States, as the case of the Russell Tribunal illustrates, is also a way of shifting toward a more global sense of accountability where all regimes (no matter the extent of their power) are subject to critical examination for their actions.

In conclusion the prevailing research in human geography on memories of the Vietnam War alerts us to the centrality of performance in the pursuit of justice and the duplicity of the West in who is permitted to pursue justice, by what means, at what financial and emotional cost, and when a mythical statue of limitations is understood to expire. Human geography’s research at the intersection of memory and justice offers numerous intellectual possibilities with other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Willie Jamaal Wright’s research is exceptional because he examines marronage, a concept central to studies of US slavery, as it relates to North Vietnamese rebels protecting themselves from American bombing by creating the Cu Chi tunnels system (Wright, 2020). Applying ideas at the forefront of contemporary human geographical thinking to other disciplinary arenas grappling with the Vietnam War would extend and embolden geography’s strengths in generating fruitful comparative studies.

Conclusions

Problematizing the fiftieth anniversary of the formal conclusion of the Vietnam War, this paper raises the profile of the geographical literature on the Vietnam War by organizing it according to three prominent themes: territory, circuitry, and memory. Though there are other components of Vietnam War geographies (e.g., the gendered dimensions of the war, diplomacy, and connections to the Cold War) territory, circuitry, and memory are selected for their cache across a range of debates in human geography, specifically political, economic, social, and development geographies. The recent pulse of work on the Vietnam War from geographers signals that in another fifty years there may be an even more robust body of literature available for future geographers to categorize, build on, and critique.

Territory, circuitry, and memory are also chosen because they advance debates in war, imperialism, and justice studies that motivate ongoing studies in the social sciences and humanities. War, imperialism, and justice studies are of shared interest to many intellectual communities studying the Vietnam War but there is a need to identify the connective tissue bringing them together: my argument here is that geography is one productive way to do this work. What I have found in investigating human geography’s analysis of the Vietnam War is that its value is largely underappreciated by cognate disciplines such as anthropology, politics, international relations, history, sociology, Asian studies, Vietnamese studies, and diaspora studies. Meanwhile geographers would do well to more closely attune to research from their counterparts in these fields to gain a more complete picture of the war, its temporalities, its instigators, and its victims. In light of the misleading public commentary on the Vietnam War from Vietnam, the United States, and many other nations, the visibility of social sciences and humanities research on the Vietnam War is due to be boosted. I hope this article is a contributor to this ambition.

The Vietnam War is a global phenomenon with much more expansive spatialities and temporalities than most appraisals would have us believe. Another way to say this is that the paper extends the boundaries of how we should conceptualize the Vietnam War while also encouraging a clearer view of how and where the war is emplaced. Depictions of the Vietnam War are usually only about either Vietnam or the United States but generating this false binary occludes Vietnam’s civil war that precipitated foreign involvement; the tentacles of the US’s military industrial complex and its partners that continue to benefit economically and imperially from the war; the still punishing impacts from the war on victims; the fragmentation and distance that refugees all over the world must navigate; as well as how the war is a harbinger of more recent authoritarian, militarized movements in Asia and the West.

Though fascinating, the geography catalogue on the Vietnam War includes some gaps that undermine its potency and, as alluded to above, limit its intellectual value to other fields. The first and most serious constraint is the lack of attention to the civil war aspects of the Vietnam War. Said directly geographers have virtually ignored that the roots of the Vietnam War were in a domestic battle over the future of the nation (Asselin, 2024; Goscha, 2016, though see Tyner, 2007). Tangentially the same can be said for the war in Laos that the United States and its allies involved itself in (but see Baird, 2025). Pitting the United States against a singular “Vietnam” in war, as many corners of geography have depicted the conflict, is a historical inaccuracy and sharply weakens geographical influence on Vietnam War research.

Another gap revolves around the absence of perspectives on the war from geographers who are not white men. Outside of a handful discussed above (Boyle and Kobayashi, 2015; Hughes, 2008, 2015) there is a notable lack of work among geographers on the Vietnam War who identify as women (though see McElwee, 2005). At its core the Vietnam War canon includes women conducting exceptional studies of the war, including but not exclusively from a gender lens (see Nguyen, 2025; Nguyen, 2018; Stur, 2011). My referencing practice demonstrates that there is also a lack of research in geography about the war in English from Vietnamese and/or the Vietnamese diaspora, with the exception of Tyner who has collaborated with Cambodian colleagues on a number of projects related to the global war. English-language human geography, however, largely does not include researchers from these vital groups studying the war. There is thus a pressing need for Vietnam War research from diaspora, female, and LGBTQ + geographers (Osius, 2021), as well as more from geographers who identify as people of color.

The above research I have outlined, particularly in the section “circuitry and imperialism” but also present in “territory and war” and “memory and justice,” is driven by a prominent corner of UBC Geography that identifies as male and overwhelmingly white⁵. I am not disputing the value or quality of the research; this article would not exist without it. But a largely white and male “Vietnam War School” as a sub-set of the UBC Department of Geography begs the question about intellectual direction and training practice from what is indisputably one of the most important centers of geographical knowledge in the world. Feminist geopolitics provides a robust template for unwinding the nation-state bias of traditional geopolitical research (Hyndman, 2001). As Hyndman writes a feminist geopolitics framework would seem helpful to further understanding of a clash like the Vietnam War: “(feminist geopolitics) embodies an approach that advocates a finer scale of ‘security’ accountable to people, as individuals and groups, and analyzes the spaces of violence that traverse public/private distinctions” (Hyndman, 2001: 219). Given recent intensified attacks on immigrants in the Global North and the massive forced resettlement occurring around the world as a result of war more work on the experiences of the global Vietnamese diaspora and post-war Vietnamese migration from a geographical perspective would be welcome, at UBC and elsewhere.

As of this writing Vietnam continues to exuberantly celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its expulsion of America and peaceful reunification⁶ while elsewhere wars based on territorial, imperial, economic, and genocidal intent are poisoning the world. Thus a final open ended question to raise is to what extent geographical research on the Vietnam War is relevant to issues central to contemporary international relations, diplomacy, war, and nationhood. As the paper has put forward it is worth seriously thinking about whether formally capping the Vietnam War’s conclusion on April 30, 1975, is accurate, possible, or fair. If it is inaccurate, impossible, and unfair, then the current global wars would seem to be primed for much longer shelf lives and deeper consequences than are being reckoned with today.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Don Mitchell for his focused and patient stewardship of the paper. The reviewers gave me a lot to think about and I am grateful for their critiques and support. Conversations over the years with Herbert Covert, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Liam Kelley, Alex Thái Dinh Võ, and Gerard Sasges helped me clarify the paper, thank you all.

ORCID iD

Jamie Gillen

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Jamie Gillen is an associate professor in the Global Studies programme at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. His research interests span human geography and are illuminated through Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

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Geographical imaginations of the global Vietnam War

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Globalizing Vietnam and the Vietnam War

Territory and war

Circuitry and imperialism

Memory and justice

Conclusions

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

ORCID iD

Funding

Declaration of conflicting interests

Notes

Author biography

References