Varieties of Decolonization: How Alliances Enabled and Constrained Anticolonial Strategy in Vietnam and Senegal

Austin Vo, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Why did some national liberation struggles turn toward revolutionary anticolonialism while others achieved their goals within colonial apparatuses? Prior research focusing on relations between colonized elites and colonial authority have yet to fully consider how alliances among indigenous groups pattern anticolonial strategy. This study shifts the analytical focus towards local contestations and negotiations from below between emergent social actors, relationships, and coalitions. I analyze alliance formation across space (urban/rural) and status (elite/mass) using a paired comparison between two former French colonies. I find that Vietnam’s alliances bridged both spatial and status divides while Senegal’s bridged status divides but maintained urban/rural divides. I advance a relational and networked analysis, in which mechanisms of anticolonial strategy cannot be reduced to working-class formation or peasant rebellion, for example, but rather are constituted by one process being contingent on another. I then examine the consequences of this divergence using counterfactuals in which alliance formation failed in one case but succeeded in the other. I employ lower-level archival records collected in Vietnam, Senegal, and France to analyze decolonial trajectories as dynamic and contingent processes, explaining not only why certain historical paths are not taken but how it could have been different.

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 Presented in Session 122. Ideas, Networks, and Alliances in Revolutionary Transformation