After Saigon's Fall Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975–2000 Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations Series

Few historians of the Vietnam War have covered the post-1975 era or engaged comprehensively with refugee politics, humanitarianism, and human rights as defining issues of the period. After Saigon's Fall is the first major work to uncover this history. Amanda C. Demmer offers a new account of the post-War normalization of US?Vietnam relations by centering three major transformations of the late twentieth century: the reassertion of the US Congress in American foreign policy; the Indochinese diaspora and changing domestic and international refugee norms; and the intertwining of humanitarianism and the human rights movement. By tracing these domestic, regional, and global phenomena, After Saigon's Fall captures the contingencies and contradictions inherent in US-Vietnamese normalization. Using previously untapped archives to recover a riveting narrative with both policymakers and nonstate advocates at its center, Demmer's book also reveals much about US politics and society in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Introduction; Part I: 1. The fall of Saigon; 2. Human rights, refugees, and normalization; Part II: 3. Expanding the US agenda; 4. US-SRV cooperation; Part III: 5. Refugees and the road map; 6. Humanitarian issues, human rights, and ongoing normalization; Conclusion.

Amanda C. Demmer is an Assistant Professor in the history department at Virginia Tech University.