Decolonization and the Cold War

My remarks will focus on the complex ways that our understanding of the Vietnam War have been shaped simultaneously by new scholarship on the Cold War, especially its international and cultural dimensions, and new scholarship on decolonization.  I will suggest that a growing sensitivity to the multiple intersections between decolonization and the Cold War – arguably two of the dominant world-historical forces of the mid-twentieth century – have enriched, invigorated, and complicated the Vietnam War scholarship of the past two decades.