The Harvard University Center for African Studies is pleased to co-sponsor “Fighting for a Different Heart and Mind: African Soldiers, Psychological Warfare, and Competing Internationalisms in the First Indochina War, 1946–1954,” a talk by Andrew H. Bellisari, Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University.
Between 1946 and 1954, more than 180,000 servicemen from France’s colonies in North and Sub-Saharan Africa were deployed to French Indochina. Their presence became central to competing French and Vietnamese efforts to shape colonial loyalties, anticolonial solidarity, and the future of the postwar international order.
Bellisari’s talk examines the psychological warfare campaigns developed by French officers and Vietnamese Communist cadres to influence African soldiers serving in Indochina. In doing so, it explores how African troops became entangled in competing visions of postwar internationalism: renewed imperial federation under the French Union on one hand, and global anticolonial solidarity led by Vietnamese Communism on the other.
The event will be moderated by Uyen Nguyen, Assistant Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.
Date: November 6, 2026
Time: 12:00–1:30 PM
Location: S250, Porté Room, CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA
This is an in-person event. Registration is free.
Organized by: Harvard University Asia Center
Co-sponsored by: Harvard University Center for African Studies and the Southeast Asia Initiative