The "Other" Peace Movement:

Third Force Opposition in South Vietnam

On January 27, 1973, representatives of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (PRG, known in the West as “Việt Cộng”), and the United States met in Paris to sign the “Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam.” The Paris Peace Accords – as it was called – mandated U.S. troops’ withdrawal, North Vietnam’s release of American prisoners of war, and an eventual unification of Vietnam. Notably, Article 12 of the Accords stipulated the establishment of a National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord (NCNRC) to oversee the ceasefire and organize a general election to determine a representative government for South Vietnam.

The NCNRC would consist of three equal segments: the Government of Vietnam (GVN, or the First Force), the communist-led PRG (successor of the National Liberation Front, or the Second Force), and the ostensibly “neutralist” Third Force (Lực Lượng Thứ Ba), which also became known as the Third Segment or the Third Component (Thành Phần Thứ Ba) after 1973. This informal Third Force coalition included a range of political, religious, and civic organizations and movements that sought peace through nonviolent nationalism and political neutralism.

The Third Force was recognized by the Paris Peace Agreement as a vehicle for political compromise but harshly rejected by the South Vietnamese government--making inevitable a military conclusion of the war and massive numbers of panicked refugees.

Dr. Sophie Quinn-Judge will discuss the early formation of proto-Third Force groups in the First Republic of Vietnam and the inter-republic years.

Dr. An Thuy Nguyen will give an overview of the Third Force opposition in the Second Republic between the 1968 Tết Offensive and the 1973 Paris Peace Accords.

Dr. Thi Lien Claire Tran will offer a closer look at the progressive Catholics who constituted one of the most important and active blocs within the Third Force, especially in the last years of the war.

An Thuy Nguyen

An Thuy Nguyen is a historian of U.S. foreign relations, Vietnam, women, and labor. She currently teaches at The University of Maine’s Bureau of Labor of Education. She was the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Marilyn B. Young Dissertation Fellow in 2020-2021 and received her Ph.D. from UMaine. Her historical research focuses on foreign policies, democratic governance, and the political activism of non-state actors. She has authored various book reviews, book chapters, and articles on the Vietnam War. She is currently working on a book about the Vietnamese Third Force’s and the Nixon Doctrine in Asia, in addition to her other projects in labor education and history.

SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE

Sophie Quinn-Judge is the author of Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, Christopher Hurst and University of California Press, 2003; and The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive Search for Peace 1954-75, I.B. Tauris, 2016. Until 2015 she was an Associate Professor of History at Temple University. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of London (SOAS) after working for the American Friends Service Committee and as a freelance journalist in Moscow. She first went to Vietnam in 1973 as a volunteer for the AFSC.

THI LIEN CLAIRE TRAN

Thi Lien Claire Tran is Associate Professor at Paris Cité University where she teaches History of Southeast Asia and serves as a member of the research unit Cessma (Centre for Social Sciences Studies on the African, American and Asian Worlds). She is responsible for the Master 1 History of Civilizations and Heritage and chairs the M1 Admissions Committee. She is also on the board of the Paris Graduate School of Arts, History and Humanities in Global Perspective (GSAH). From 2016 to 2021, she was Director of IRASEC (the Institute for Research on Contemporary Southeast Asia) in Bangkok, Thailand.