*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Tuong Vu is director of Asian Studies and professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, and has held visiting appointments at Princeton University and National University of Singapore as well as taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Vu’s research and teaching concern the comparative politics of state formation, development, nationalism, and revolutions, with a particular focus on East Asia. He is the author of two books on the politics of development, state formation, and revolution in East Asia as well as the co-editor of six books on Southeast Asian politics, the Cold War in Asia, the Republic of Vietnam (1955-1975), Vietnamese republicanism, contemporary Vietnamese politics and economy, and the Vietnamese American community. Among his works are Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology (Cambridge, 2017), Paths to Development in Asia: South Korea, Vietnam, China, and Indonesia (Cambridge, 2010), Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture (Palgrave, 2009), and Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (Stanford, 2008).

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I work between fields, subfields, regions, and topics, whether it is comparative politics/international relations; political science/history; political economy/political sociology; East Asian/Southeast Asian studies; Vietnamese communism/republicanism; Vietnamese history/Vietnamese American history. In the last five years or so, my work has focused on three distinct topics, including the imperial origins of the modern nation-state order in East Asia; the relationship between radical revolutions and the global order; and Vietnamese republican history and politics. For my first two topics, I have followed scholarship in International Relations, I’m excited by the works that excavate historical trends (such as Fukuyama 2011; Zarakol 2011), or that take ideologies and identities seriously (Phillips 2011; Phillips and Reus-Smit 2020), or that compare empires (Go 2011), or on state-formation and nation-building (Matsuzaki 2019).  

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

As my scholarship evolves, I have come to look beyond (existing) national borders and adopt transnational and global perspectives. I have learned tremendously from the field of International Relations, yet feel that the field is limited by its fixation on (modern) national borders, which is reflected in the very term “international.” When I study the relationship........

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