Blog 8

The Vietnam War is a hard one to define. You could define it as many different things because of the different factions involved in the conflict. In fact, calling it a war isn’t even technically accurate from the point of the United States because the United States never actually declared war. So, from the United States perspective, the Vietnam War was an armed military conflict. However, the comparative politics book does not have a definition for armed military conflict under political violence, so we are going to have to come up with either a broader or, more likely a more narrow definition of what exactly the Vietnam war was.

Historically, the Vietnam war started as two factions of Vietnam¹, that happened to be isolated geographically, began to war with one another over the issue of communism. The geographical locations were between north Vietnam, who was supported by communist countries, and south Vietnam who was supported by anti-communist countries. The Vietnamese government and the sovereignty of the government, at the time, was in South Vietnam. So, presumably, one might say that this seems like something of either a civil war, or a revolution.

The definition of a civil war would work for the Vietnam war because “A civil war is defined as armed combat within the boundaries of a sovereign state between parties that are subject to common authority at the start of the hostilities.”² So, the country of Vietnam was once a single unit of sovereignty until the conflict arose. This fact would characterize the conflict as being a civil war. However, this is not the only definition of political violence that could fit for this conflict.

The definition of a revolution would also work for the Vietnam war because a revolutions is defined as “armed conflict within a sovereign state between insurgents and the state, in which the insurgents and the state claim allegiance of a significant proportion of the population; authority over the state is forcibly transferred from the state to the insurgents, and the insurgents subsequently bring about wholesale political change.”³ In fact, using these definitions, the Vietnam war could have been called both of these, a civil war and revolution. There are not definitional boundaries clearly separating the two from one another. In fact, the book says that the “distinction is the fact that a revolution is a civil war in which the insurgents win, and gain control of the state.”

Both of these definitions would hold, until the United States stepped in to fight the south Vietnam’s losing battle. This transformed what was once a revolution, or civil war into an interstate conflict which is defined as “the use of violence by states against other states to achieve political goals.”⁴ At the time, the political goal was to further the cause of democracy. The exact definition of this also fits within the scope of the Vietnam war.

So, in conclusion, there is not really any one definition that fits an armed conflict such as this. It was both a revolution and a civil war. It was an interstate conflict. It was something completely different than can be easily categorized by the definitions given by Samuels in the book Comparative Politics. The Vietnam war is a different beast entirely, which is why I think it should be defined as an aided revolutionary civil war. This type of conflict would be defined as group of insurgents that gain traction enough to challenge the sovereignty of existing government, aided by states (either monetarily or physically) outside their own that are trying to further a political cause or goal. This definition serves the conflict much better because it is narrow enough to directly describe the situation; the purpose of a definition.

 

1. "Vietnam War". Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/628478/Vietnam-War. Retrieved 5 March 2008. "Meanwhile, the United States, its military demoralized and its civilian electorate deeply divided, began a process of coming to terms with defeat in its longest and most controversial war"

2, 3, 4. “Political Violence” Chapter 10, Comparative Politics, David J. Samuels