2025 Theses Doctoral

Buddhist Nation-Building in Postcolonial Vietnam: Religion, Resistance, and the Politics of Possibility

Le, Adrienne

This dissertation examines the Vietnamese Buddhist movement as a significant yet understudied force in postcolonial Vietnam—one that challenged the militarized pathways to independence forged by both the communist North and anti-communist South. It reveals how Buddhist leaders articulated an alternative vision for nation-building, expressed through religious modernization, popular mobilization, rural development, and international diplomacy.

Central to this exploration is Thích Nhất Hạnh—a monk, educator, and peace activist whose life and work exemplify the Buddhist movement’s complex relationship to national and global politics. Although widely recognized today as a global spiritual leader, critical scholarship has overlooked his formative years and early contributions to Vietnamese political and cultural life. By tracing his journey from colonial-era religious institutes and wartime grassroots organizing to international diplomacy, this dissertation provides the first scholarly examination of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s efforts to build a nonviolent alternative to militarized revolution.

Drawing extensively on previously unutilized Vietnamese-language periodicals, organizational documents, state archives, and oral histories, this dissertation reconstructs the internal debates, visions, and strategies of Buddhist leaders from the 1920s religious revival through their peak political activism during the 1960s and 1970s. Challenging orientalist assumptions about religious actors, it offers a social movement history that shows how Vietnamese Buddhists navigated questions of modernization, sovereignty, and representation in a divided country at war.

By reframing modern Vietnamese history from the perspective of religious and civic leaders operating outside of state structures, this dissertation contributes to ongoing debates about nation-building and ideological conflict in Cold War historiography. It offers a critical reinterpretation of South Vietnam’s national project, highlighting the ways in which militarized nation-building projects marginalized and precluded alternative visions. Ultimately, it calls for a reconsideration of entrenched war narratives by illuminating an alternate, nonviolent political possibility in the postcolonial world.