After Saigon's Fall
Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975–2000

A new understanding of US policy toward Vietnam after the end of the Vietnam War based on fresh archival discoveries.

Amanda C. Demmer (Author)

9781108726276, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 May 2022

328 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.486 kg

'Amanda Demmer presents us with an entirely new way of looking at U.S.-Vietnamese relations after 1975 … Demmer's book is a most welcome addition to what is still a relatively scarce scholarship on the post war period, and is undoubtedly the definitive study on the complex intertwined processes of U.S-SRV normalization and South Vietnamese migration to the United States.' Kathryn C. Statler, Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review

Few historians of the Vietnam War have covered the post-1975 era or engaged comprehensively with refugee politics, humanitarianism, and human rights as defining issues of the period. After Saigon's Fall is the first major work to uncover this history. Amanda C. Demmer offers a new account of the post-War normalization of US–Vietnam relations by centering three major transformations of the late twentieth century: the reassertion of the US Congress in American foreign policy; the Indochinese diaspora and changing domestic and international refugee norms; and the intertwining of humanitarianism and the human rights movement. By tracing these domestic, regional, and global phenomena, After Saigon's Fall captures the contingencies and contradictions inherent in US-Vietnamese normalization. Using previously untapped archives to recover a riveting narrative with both policymakers and nonstate advocates at its center, Demmer's book also reveals much about US politics and society in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Introduction
Part I: 1. The fall of Saigon
2. Human rights, refugees, and normalization
Part II: 3. Expanding the US agenda
4. US-SRV cooperation
Part III: 5. Refugees and the road map
6. Humanitarian issues, human rights, and ongoing normalization
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Vietnam War [HBWS2], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK], Asian history [HBJF]