Peace, Violence, and Buddhism: The First Indochina War (1945-54) in the Cambodian-Vietnamese Borderlands - with Professor Shawn McHale

Peace, Violence, and Buddhism: The First Indochina War (1945-54) in the Cambodian-Vietnamese Borderlands with Professor Shawn McHale

Professor Shawn McHale (George Washington University)

During the First Indochina War in the Mekong delta of Vietnam, lay Buddhists both engaged in extensive ethnic and political violence as well as in attempts to transcend such violence. To understand this issue, the talk will address the following clusters of topics. First, it will examine the Vietnamese-Cambodian borderlands, a region where quite distinct cultural realms meet, giving rise to complex localized cultural practices. Second, it will look at how radical uncertainty and dynamics of violence shaped the First Indochina War (1945-1954) in the Mekong Delta. Third, it will examine the rise, in this context, of Minh Đăng Quang and the pacifist Mendicant [khất sĩ] branch of Buddhism. This branch combined Theravada and Mahayana practices and beliefs in a new amalgam, one shaped both by localized "borderlands" culture as well as by trans-Asiatic movements of Buddhist modernism.

Shawn McHale is Professor of History and International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University (Washington, DC, USA). This year he is a visiting fellow with the Collegium de Lyon at the University of Lyon (France). The author of Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam, 1920-1945 (Hawaii University Press, 2004) and The First Vietnam War: Sovereignty, Violence, and the Fracture of the South, 1945-56 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is now working on a book on peace, violence, and Buddhism in the Cambodian-Vietnamese borderlands. A recipient of numerous fellowships, he received his PhD in Southeast Asian history from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY, USA).