Postcolonial conflict in Southeast Asia

This chapter examines geographies of postcolonial conflict in Southeast Asia during “Asia’s Cold War” (1946–1990), focusing on three distinct, but interconnected, national settings; Vietnam, Philippines, and Indonesia. The classical geopolitical idea of the shatterbelt, if cleansed of its Euro-centrism and historical narrowness, offers a useful lens onto dynamics of postcolonial conflict in the region. We rethink the shatterbelt as a spatial concept that integrates varied and competing agencies operating at multiple and intersecting spatial scales. We also incorporate a temporal concept of colonial rupture to emphasize both the violence of transition from Euro-American empire to American hegemony and colonialism’s enduring elements. In tracing the emergence of warfare and mass violence across multiple locations and geographical scales, the three cases presented here—the First Indochina War in Vietnam, militarization of the Philippines, and mass killings in Indonesia—illustrate deeper historical causes and a broader field of conflict that help explain the brutal production of a postcolonial shatterzone in Southeast Asia throughout much of Asia’s Cold War.