Archives par mot-clé : Sophie Quinn-Judge

Christopher Goscha : Peace matters [book review]

[ndlr] Signalement de la recension de l’ouvrage de Sophie Quinn-Judge (The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive Search for Peace, 1954-75) par Christopher E. Goscha. En accès libre pendant quelques jours sur Mekong Review. Lecture vivement conseillée.

Sophie Quinn-Judge landed in central Vietnam in 1973 as a member of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). She served in the AFSC-run Rehabilitation Centre in Quang Ngai province until the end of the war in 1975, providing prosthetics and relief help to war-injured civilians coming from all sides of the conflict ripping Vietnam apart. Quinn-Judge grew up in Quaker country in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Although she was not initially a member of this breakaway Protestant faith, she took part in their youth camps as a youngster and felt at home working in the AFSC in France and Vietnam.

The Quakers established the AFSC upon the United States’ entry into the First World War in 1917. The Quakers refused to take part in war as an article of faith. So instead of sending their sons into the trenches of the Western Front, the AFSC mobilised their young people to help civilians hurt and displaced by the conflagration. The AFSC did more than provide humanitarian aid, however. Drawing on centuries of Quaker pacifism, the organisation actively promoted “lasting peace with justice, as a practical expression of faith in action”. Educational programs, youth camps and exchanges helped nurture “the seeds of change and respect for human life that transform social relations and systems”. In 1947, the AFSC received the Nobel Prize for Peace for its humanitarian relief efforts during and after the Second World War and its promotion of world peace. The Quakers continued their work during the Cold War, dispatching people to work in war-torn areas of the Afro-Asian world, including Vietnam.[1]

Quinn-Judge carried these values with her to Quang Ngai, working tirelessly in the rehabilitation centre. Arriving shortly after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, she also became an advocate of peace. The Paris Agreement, signed by the Vietnamese and US sides in January 1973, called for the creation of a coalition government in South Vietnam that would eventually replace the embattled Republic of Vietnam. The coalition would include members from this state, a host of non-communist religious, neutralist and democratic leaders, as well as the communist-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) and the People’s Revolutionary Government for the south. This southern coalition would then decide the south’s destiny via negotiations with the north.

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Image “à la une” : With journalists from Van nghe quan doi, Quinn-Judge, far right. Photograph : Claudia Krich © Mekong Review

 

Sophie Quinn-Judge : The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive Search for Peace 1954-75 [parution]

[ndlr] Avis de parution d’une nouvelle étude l’historienne Sophie Quinn-Judge. Présentation de l’éditeur.

It was the conflict that shocked America and the world, but the struggle for peace is central to the history of the Vietnam War. Rejecting the idea that war between Hanoi and the US was inevitable, the author traces North Vietnam’s programs for a peaceful reunification of their nation from the 1954 Geneva negotiations up to the final collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. She also examines the ways that groups and personalities in South Vietnam responded by crafting their own peace proposals, in the hope that the Vietnamese people could solve their disagreements by engaging in talks without outside interference. While most of the writing on peacemaking during the Vietnam War concerns high-level international diplomacy, Sophie Quinn-Judge reminds us of the courageous efforts of southern Vietnamese, including Buddhists, Catholics, students and citizens, to escape the unprecedented destruction that the US war brought to their people. The author contends that US policymakers showed little regard for the attitudes of the South Vietnamese population when they took over the war effort in 1964 and sent in their own troops to fight it in 1965.

A unique contribution of this study is the interweaving of developments in South Vietnamese politics with changes in the balance of power in Hanoi; both of the Vietnamese combatants are shown to evolve towards greater rigidity as the war progresses, while the US grows increasingly committed to President Thieu in Saigon, after the election of Richard Nixon. Not even the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement could blunt US support for Thieu and his obstruction of the peace process. The result was a difficult peace in 1975, achieved by military might rather than reconciliation, and a new realization of the limits of American foreign policy.

Sophie Quinn-Judge is the Associate Director of the Centre for Vietnamese History at Temple University. She was for many years a South East Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and for The Guardian. One of the foremost scholars of the Vietnam War, she taught for many years at the LSE and SOAS.

Ref. : Quinn-Judge, Sophie, The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive Search for Peace 1954-75, London, I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2017, 336 p. ISBN: 9781784535971

Source : I.B.Tauris

 

Trois conférences de Sophie Quinn-Judge sur le Viêt-Nam à l’Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7

L’historienne Sophie Quinn-Judge (Temple University, Philadelphie) donnera trois conférences à l’Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7 au mois de mars 2014. A ne pas manquer.

SophieQuinnJudge

Auteure de Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years (1919-1941), Berkeley, University of California Press (2001).

Professeure invitée à Paris Diderot

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  • Le vendredi 7 mars 2014 de 14h à 16h en salle 127 – Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges

Women in the early Vietnamese communist movement: Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Her Unexamined Legacy

  • Le mardi 11 mars 2014 de 14h à 16h en salle 1019 – Bâtiment Sophie Germain

Histoire du communisme vietnamien: sources et méthodes

  • Le vendredi 14 mars 2014 de 10h à 12h en salle 204 – Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges

International Influences on the Vietnamese Communist Movement: from Moscow and Paris to Shanghai and Singapore

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Ces conférences sont organisées dans le cadre des séminaires de Master Histoire de l’Asie (Claire Trân Thi Liên) et Relations internationales contemporaines (Sophie Coeuré) et en association avec les laboratoires Cessma et ICT.

Lieu: Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7, Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges et Bâtiment Sophie Germain

Rue Albert Einstein, Paris 13e.

Métro ligne 14 – RER C Arrêt Bibliothèque François Mitterrand – Tram T3 Porte de France.

Télécharger le programme des conférences (pdf) :

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