Protest in the Vietnam War Era

"With admirable global range, this refreshingly insightful volume explores the importance of international protests against the Vietnam War for the radicalising of national politics. By emphasizing the transnational circulation of ideas and people so vital to that history, it challenges older notions of centre and periphery, while decentring the United States from the story." --Geoff Eley, University of Michigan, USA. This book assesses the global emergence and transformation of protest movements during the Vietnam War era. It explores the relationship between activism explicitly focused on the war and other emancipatory and revolutionary struggles, moving beyond existing scholarship to examine the myriad interlinked protest issues and mobilisations around the globe during the Second Indochina War. Bringing together scholars working from a range of geographical, historiographical, and methodological perspectives, the volume offers a new framework for understanding the history of Vietnam War protest. A central inspiration is to shift our focus away from established perspectives that are thoroughly focused on the role of the United States with only peripheral attention paid to other parts of the world. The chapters are organised around the confluence of movements from the three geopolitical regions of the world: the core capitalist countries of the so-called first world, the socialist bloc, and the Global South, chiefly during the 1960s and early 1970s, but harking back to antecedents where appropriate. The opening section of the book lays the groundwork by focusing on international organisations that explicitly sought to bridge and unite solidarity and protest around the world. In a world of persistent military conflict, this book provides timely contributions to the larger questions of what war does to protest movements and what protest movements do to war. Alexander Sedlmaier is Reader in Modern History at Bangor University, Wales,UK, and International Fellow at the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. He works on contemporary German, European, and North American history and is author of Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany (2014).