Papers

• From Vietnam to Palestine : One struggle, many fronts? Diasporic anti-imperialism and changing transnational solidarities in Cold War France Bois Ombeline Université Paul-Valéry

  While Vietnam and Palestine are often framed as two fronts of a shared global anti-imperialist struggle, their respective modes of mobilization and degrees of centrality within the French context evolved significantly between the 1950s and the early 1970s. This paper examines these transformations through the case of France, understood as a key site of militant and diasporic circulation. It also shifts the focus away from a historiography centered on French mediations by placing Vietnamese and Arab actors at the core of these mobilizations.
  It argues that, from the end of the colonial period to the late 1960s, the Vietnam War constituted a major matrix of anti-imperialism in France. Supported by a long-established Vietnamese diaspora and strong connections with the French Communist Party and leftist networks, the Vietnamese cause became deeply embedded in militant activism. However, after 1968, the landscape of mobilization changed: Vietnam declined as a plurality of causes emerged, among which the Palestinian cause gained visibility.
  Like the Vietnamese cause, mobilization in support of Palestine relied on political mediation, but it was distinguished by the growing role of parapolitical structures and renewed repertoires of engagement, including emotional and humanitarian registers. It also became embedded in French social dynamics, particularly through mobilizations of North African immigrants and labor struggles, contributing to the “nationalization” of the Palestinian cause.
  Drawing on French surveillance archives, this paper shows that state authorities participated in this shift by producing comparative frameworks between diasporic mobilizations. Reports from the early 1970s contrasted the relative discretion of Vietnamese migrants with the activism attributed to “Arabs and Muslims in France.” Far from neutral, such comparisons relied on colonial forms of categorization, producing racialized and hierarchical representations.
  This paper invites a reconsideration of “imperial entanglements” as historically contingent configurations shaped by diasporic actors, evolving repertoires of activism, and state-produced categories.

• Building BDS Thailand: Solidarity With Palestine Through Apartheid Free Zones Areerat Worawongwasu University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

  Through scholar-activism, this paper traces the multifaceted imperial entanglements between Israel and Thailand, as well as offers strategies to end said imperial entanglements. Thailand is currently a critical outlet of escape for an increasingly isolated Israel, facilitating a business as usual facade that masks settler-colonial apartheid and genocide. Through its military-industrial ties, the Thai military relies on Israeli ammunition and training systematically “field- tested” on Palestinians. The number of Thai workers in Israel-occupied Palestine has risen from an estimated 25,000-30,000 before October 7, 2023, to nearly 40,000. Through war crime tourism, in which IOF soldiers utilize Thailand for “emotional recovery,” leading to the emergence of exclusionary Israeli enclaves that circumvent Thai sovereignty via nominee schemes. Foregrounded in this analysis is the strategic imperative for revitalizing BDS Thailand.
  Drawing on the 2024 ICJ ruling, which frames ending complicity as an international legal obligation, the paper argues that BDS Thailand’s Apartheid-Free Zone (AFZ) campaign provides a necessary mechanism to dismantle these local pillars of complicity with Israel. AFZs are local spaces that pledge to be “complicit-free.” This means committing to boycotting products and companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. By moving from symbolic gestures to strategic action through organizing targeted boycotts of complicit multinational companies, BDS Thailand seeks to materially challenge the normalization of genocide. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of Southeast Asia, making the dismantling of these imperial entanglements a requirement for regional sovereignty, solidarity, and collective liberation.

• From Myanmar to Palestine and Back Again: Fossil Empire, Frontier Militarisms, and Genocidal Regimes Geoffrey Aung University of Vienna

  The destruction of Palestine is the destruction of Myanmar—that is the argument of this paper. Bringing together genocide in Gaza and the brutal counterinsurgency in Myanmar, I excavate a history of colonization and extraction that connects these catastrophes. Fossil empire—the burning of fossil fuels to project imperial power—emerges not in Palestine in the 1840s, as Andreas Malm suggests, but in Myanmar’s 1820s. Britain’s steam-powered, coal-fueled navy overwhelmed Myanmar resistance and inaugurated over a century of colonial extraction—some fifteen years before a similar dynamic unfolded in coastal Palestine. Burma’s oil fields, the largest in the British Empire and the most productive until the rise of the Persian Gulf, later supplied the Admiralty as it shifted from coal to oil in powering its warships. After independence, Burma’s new ruling class saw Israel as a kindred socialist state-building project threatened by insurgencies. Close relations yielded military cooperation, a joint frontier settlement scheme, and arms deals, including weapons captured by Israel in Lebanon following the withdrawal of Palestinian forces, and later used by Myanmar’s military. Over time, oil and gas revenues became central to military rule in Myanmar, while Chinese backing—sustaining the regime today—took material form in pipelines linking Myanmar to refineries in Yunnan, embedding the country in a new geography of fossil empire. At the same time, activists and militants have drawn connections between the Rohingya genocide and the colonization of Palestine, particularly through frontier settlement projects and apartheid-like systems. These entanglements point not to identical conditions but to shared processes that produce both parallels and divergences. They also open the possibility of broader solidarities between the peoples of Palestine and Myanmar—and of recognizing their struggles as deeply interconnected.

• Thai migrants in Israel: The outsourcing of colonization Matan Kaminer Queen Mary University London

  The death of dozens of Thai migrant workers in the October 7th attacks on Israel brought this community to world headlines for a brief time. While the news cycle has moved on, in the years since Israel has only become more reliant on their labor. In this talk I consider how the recruitment of migrants from Thailand for labor on Israeli farms (and increasingly in other sectors) implies an “outsourcing” of the work of colonization, and what this entails for our understanding of settler colonial projects. If it is both politically plausible and economically profitable to relegate the risks and hardships of colonization to people who receive none of the privileges and benefits associated with settler status, it seems, the struggle for Palestinian freedom must be articulated with emancipatory struggles elsewhere in the Global South.

Abstract

Keywords

• Cold War France
• Israel
• Myanmar
• Organizing
• Palestine
• Palestinian cause
• Solidarity
• Thailand
• Transnational activism
• Vietnam War
• activism
• agriculture
• anti-imperialism
• colonialism
• diaspora engagement
• genocide
• imperialism
• resource extraction
• state surveillance