Contested Territory

Reviews / Votes

"Drawing on years of detailed fieldwork and painstaking documentary research at the underexplored National Archives of Vietnam, Lentz constructs a new narrative of the events surrounding the decisive moment in Vietnam's struggle for independence from French colonial rule: the 1954 Battle of Di?n Bien Ph?."-Micah L. Ingalls, Mountain Research and Development

"Lentz's fine writing opens up new perspectives on how global history unfolds on the ground, and on the contingencies and ambiguities of state-making processes."-Oliver Tappe, Southeast Asian Studies

"This is a very important book...Christian Lentz combines deep archival research in Vietnam and extended time in the field there with some impressive mastery of theory to produce one of the finest local histories of wartime Vietnam available."-Christopher Goscha, South East Asia Research

"Contested Territory is as important for the lines of future research it suggests as for the fascinating story it tells."-Grace Cheng, SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia


Listed on Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles List for 2019

Awarded the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies

"A brilliant, original work that makes a valuable, ground-level contribution to our historical understanding of a major event of the global twentieth century."-Ben Kiernan, Yale University, author of Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present

"Emplotting the history of Dien Bien Phu into the story of Vietnam's multiethnic Northwest, Christian Lentz poses questions about space, power, and territory that will stay with readers long after the final page."-Bradley Camp Davis, author of Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands

"This masterfully-researched book offers an innovative approach to our understanding of how people and places once considered marginal became integrated into Vietnam's national project and how its state territory was produced."-Oscar Salemink, University of Copenhagen

"An extraordinary achievement of historical and political geography as well as agrarian studies"-Emily T. Yeh, author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development

"In this definitive study of ?ien Bien Phu, Christian Lentz brilliantly illuminates issues of territory and territoriality, processes of nation-building, contests over land and labor, and relations between local peoples and the state."-Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University