2024/12/01 by Pedro Monaville · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Communism, Protests, Social Movements #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/ahr/rhae394
openalex publication_date 2024/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In Red Internationalism: Anti-Imperialism and Human Rights in the Global Sixties and Seventies, Salar Mohandesi explores how activists in France and the United States responded to the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The book meaningfully articulates its contributions to various scholarly conversations, including the historiographies of antiwar activism and human rights during the Vietnam War. Yet the project is perhaps first and foremost a history of the Left in the Global North. As he states in the book’s coda, Mohandesi is convinced that no one among “those of us who care about making the world a better place” (261) can dispense with a critical assessment of the powerful rise and collapse of revolutionary politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Accordingly, Red Internationalism is an attempt to recover a history for the present, which ambitiously aims to advance the possibilities of radical emancipation. Historians have long explored the multiple determinations and sources behind the radicalization of a transnational generation of students and activists in the 1960s. Red Internationalism also accounts for some of this multiplicity, but Mohandesi is more invested in capturing the essence of the period, which he locates in what he calls the Leninist problematic, “a coherent model of anti-imperialism that harmonized internationalism with nationalism, world communism with nation-building, universal emancipation with national self-determination” (47). While the Leninist problematic obviously predates the 1960s by far, Mohandesi argues that it fully blossomed in the era of global decolonization. The war in Vietnam marked its apogee, as both the Vietnamese revolutionaries and their supporters abroad fully embraced Leninism and looked at it as the key to the future of East Asia and the world.