Vietnam Update 2004: Strategic and Foreign Relations
Call for Paper
This year's Vietnam Update will be held on 25-26 November at Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS). Jointly organized by the Australian National University (ANU) and ISEAS, the theme will be "Strategic and Foreign Relations". The Update series of specialized conferences on Vietnam began at ANU in 1990. We are now soliciting proposals for papers. The conference requires 10 papers, eight for the Thematic category and two for the Update category. We hope to publish the conference papers (after necessary revisions) within a year after the conference.
Thematic Background
For much of the Cold War era, Vietnam occupied a big part of the world's attention. Its pursuit of strategic interests and conduct of foreign relations have long had important consequences for the regional, if not global, balance of power. The country's proximity to China turned it into a target of western colonialism, and its camaraderie with the socialist bloc turned its southern half into the battlefield where socialists and capitalists, and the liberal world and the totalitarian world drew their lines. In the post-Cold War era, Vietnam's position in between China and the USA still demands a delicate balancing act between both great powers. How Vietnam moves could impact on the whole region and on US-China relations as well.
In the past decade or so, Vietnam's foreign and strategic relations have undergone tremendous changes. We can list the milestones: withdrawal from Cambodia in 1989, normalization of relations with China in 1990, normalization of relations with the USA in 1994 and signing the critical Bilateral Trade Agreement with the USA in 2001; joining ASEAN in 1997, and participation in major international organizations both within and outside the framework of the United Nations Organisation; and impending entry into the World Trade Organisation. Most of the country's borders have been secured, after negotiation and settlement with neighbours in the past decade. Vietnam is looking to opening its doors wider so as to integrate into the global community. Changes in the geostrategic environment laid the foundations for the opening up of Vietnam. These important moves that took place over the past 13 years contrasted sharply with the nature of Vietnam's foreign and strategic directions earlier in the 1980s. Implicit in this paradigmatic shift in foreign and strategic policy is the change in how Vietnamese leaders view the world outside. International relations have also grown in complexity as human rights concerns and civil society linkages affect formal state-to-state relations. Vietnamese leadership has to learn to deal with these new challenges of diplomacy. In measuring these changes, it is prudent to separate what is rhetoric from what is real. "Opening the door" has not been a straight line, nor should we assume that current trends are fixed. Vietnam's leadership do have reservations and there are significant differences among leaders.
Given the importance of Vietnam's geostrategic environment to development in other areas, the Vietnam Update conference hopes to understand foreign policy and security matters from Vietnamese perspectives, particularly during the last decade or so.
Thematic Papers
For the eight thematic papers, we would like scholars to address as many of the research questions below as possible.
(a) What are the salient considerations or principles that underlie Vietnamese policy making in its strategic and foreign relations? What are the challenges to policy? Where and how do we locate the Vietnam in the academic discourse on international relations?
(b) To what extent have these significant considerations or principles changed since the early or mid 1980s? What are the imperatives for Vietnamese foreign and strategic relations in a uni-polar world?
(c) What are the domestic political and economic factors that affect Vietnam's foreign and strategic relations? What has been the impact of Vietnam's direction in strategic and foreign policy on Vietnamese society? Who makes foreign policies and how? What are the tensions and heated debates within foreign policy making circles? How are Vietnam's strategic and foreign policy specialists trained and nurtured? With VN having joined a greater number of international committees than before, is there a personnel gap? How have social, economic, and political transformations in Vietnam affected its external policies?
(d) What strategic and international issues are more important to Vietnam
than others, and why? What are Vietnamese perspectives on prominent
issues in the world today, such as terrorism, globalization, free trade,
international civil society, human rights, and the rise of
new giants in pax Americana? In its strategic and foreign policy, how
does Vietnam balance between the reality in such issues that it has
to accept and its own ideals and considerations?
(e) What is the status of relations between Vietnam and major countries and neighbours? Through what lenses can we see Vietnam's current policies towards its neighbours in Indochina, East Asia, and ASEAN, and towards majors outside the region like the US and the EU? In what ways does Vietnam prioritize its relations with different countries and regions? What are the issues that remain thorny in their relationships?
We do not expect each paper to address all the issues and questions noted above. We would like, however, each paper to take up issues from more than one of the above five clusters. Papers can approach the issues in different ways; we expect variety in this regard.
Update Papers
Besides the thematic papers, every Vietnam Update has two papers dedicated to a review of current political and economic situations respectively. The political paper besides dealing with domestic events should also incorporate the latest strategic and foreign policy developments.
Proposal Submission
The organizers invite interested writers to submit paper proposals (for both Thematic and Update Papers) with a brief CV. Whether it is a thematic or update paper, each proposal should be between 600 and 1,000 words. Proposals should be sent to David Koh by 15 May 2004. The four conference organizers will then decide which proposals to accept. We will then extend invitations to the authors of the selected proposals to prepare and present their papers to the conference. Each paper should be about 10,000 words and should be submitted 30 days before the date of the conference. The organizers also reserve the right to solicit papers, if necessary, from individuals who did not submit proposals. Funding for travel and accommodation is available and details will be discussed later with each paper presenter.
For those interested to submit thematic papers, the proposal should outline the gist, the kind of research the paper will be based on, and how it relates to the issues highlighted in the section on thematic background. Proposals for update papers should set down the political/economic trends that they seek to explore.
Conference Organisers
Dr. David Koh
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Email: davidkoh@iseas.edu.sg
Dr. Russell Heng
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Email: russell@iseas.edu.sg
Professor Benedict Kerkvliet
Department of Political & Social Change, RSPAS, ANU
Email: ben@anu.edu.au
Professor David Marr
Division of Pacific and Asian History, RSPAS, ANU
email: dgm405@anu.edu.au