Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the joint US-Vietnam and Japan-Vietnam efforts to address Agent Orange legacy in Vietnam. It investigates how technical and humanitarian projects to address war contamination and health consequences shape geopolitical and diplomatic relations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Presentation long abstract

During the Vietnam-American War, the US military and its allies employed millions of litres of chemical defoliants in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to strategically destroy vegetation that provided shelter for the Vietnamese communist guerilla forces. The most well-known of these chemicals, Agent Orange, contains a high dose of the toxic dioxin, resulting in long-lasting ecological damages and intergenerational health consequences for both local populations and military personnel. After the war ended in 1975, many national and international efforts, run by both governmental and non-governmental agencies, have been established to address the ecological and public health impacts of Agent Orange. In this paper, I examine two of these efforts, namely the bilateral US-Vietnam projects to remediate dioxin hotspots in former US military airbases and provide support for people with disabilities linked to Agent Orange, and Japan’s humanitarian and technical aid to Vietnam to address Agent Orange legacy. Drawing on project reports, governmental publications, and news media coverage, I investigate how these projects are mobilised by the various governments to shape, enhance, and reconfigure geopolitical and people-to-people diplomatic relations among Vietnam, Japan, and the US. While these projects are aimed at fostering some forms of reparative justice and countering US imperialist legacies in the region, I show that they can at times generate and perpetuate a geopolitical order centred around technological and humanitarianism dependency.