Ghosts in the Delta: USAID and the historical geographies of Vietnam's ‘other’ war

Abstract

This paper will provide historical and geographical nuance to Eyal Weizman's concept of the ‘humanitarian present’ through an interrogation of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) entanglement in Cold War counterinsurgency. Specifically, it focuses on Cold War Vietnam, where USAID, through its Offices of Rural Affairs and Public Safety, spearheaded the ‘other’ war for rural ‘hearts and minds’ through two distinct, yet related, suites of spatial interventions. First, it sought to indirectly ‘conduct the conduct’ of the South Vietnamese people by providing technical assistance and commodity support to the Strategic Hamlet and Revolutionary Development programs. USAID's counterinsurgency programming, however, was not only traversed by a ‘will to improve’: it was also marked by a ‘will to police’. Here, I am specifically referring to the central role that USAID's Office of Public Safety played in helping the government of South Vietnam establish a functioning National Police whose ‘internal security’ mandate eventually encompassed both a biopolitics of population control as well as a necropolitics of neutralization. Over the course of this essay I will theorize these two tracks of counterinsurgency programming as the Janus faces of a broader ‘war–police’ nexus geared towards catalyzing the fabrication of a modern social order in the Vietnamese countryside.