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Breaking Down the Anarchy, Isolation, and Selfishness of Urban Life: Urban Community Development and Counterinsurgency in Saigon, 1968-1975

Sun, March 19, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 2nd Floor, City Hall

Abstract

This paper examines urban community development and counterinsurgency programs in Saigon after the 1968 Tet Offensive. Based on Vietnamese and American archival sources, it argues that these projects had both domestic and transnational roots. The South Vietnamese regime of Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and its American advisors drew inspiration from the work of non-state South Vietnamese youth movements as well as the urban Community Action Programs of the United States’ War on Poverty. The goal of these projects was to mobilize Saigon’s residents to participate in their own defense and socio-economic development. The regime and its U.S. advisors hoped that these projects would create a sense of community among an atomized, urban population, thereby insulating Saigon’s poor, working-class neighborhoods from Communist appeals for another “general offensive, general uprising”. The results of these projects were ambiguous and the South Vietnamese government and its U.S. ally increasingly turned away from them in the 1970s as the threat to Saigon appeared to recede and as global trends in Third World urban development shifted.

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