War Comes to Long An, the Classic We Hardly Know?

In: Journal of Vietnamese studies, Band 6, Heft 1, S. 87-122

Abstract

First published in 1972, Jeffrey Race's War Comes to Long An has never gone out of print. It has now been republished in an updated and expanded edition. While highly regarded among Southeast Asianists as a classic account of communist success in winning control of a strategic province in the Mekong Delta from the government of the Republic of Vietnam, War Comes to Long An is also a work of innovative social science. Attention to the book's long ignored social science and to the rational-choice foundations of its analysis opens up new perspectives on the "Scott-Popkin debate." It suggests the need for reconsideration of the value of rational-choice approaches to the study not only of Southeast Asian politics but also of the modern history of the region, to which War Comes to Long An speaks in previously overlooked ways.