Fifty Years On: New Perspectives on the Vietnam Wars- Harvard GVWSI 2025 Conference

Conference Dates: October 3-4, 2025
Venue: CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium, 1730 Cambridge Street, MA 02138

The Harvard Global Vietnam Wars Studies Initiative (GVWSI) invites you to a two-day conference that brings together informed assessments from around the globe to provide an evidence-based, in-depth exploration of this multifaceted war and its complex legacies.

Fifty years have passed since North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon in 1975, after decades of set-piece battles, guerrilla warfare involving a dozen combatant nations, and overlapping civil conflicts in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Although vigorously debated in the United States, the war’s meanings and implications remain unresolved. Vietnamese and other international perspectives are rarely studied, as most current research focuses primarily on American perceptions, experiences, and memories. As a result, we still struggle to tell the broader tragedy of the conflict, even as its ashes and embers continue to spread across the globe and through generations.

A deeper understanding of the wars’ global impact is vital for history and is also timely and essential for addressing current and future conflicts. Above all, we seek to foster intellectual, historical, and cultural exchanges across nations, communities, and generations with a shared commitment to scholarship, reconciliation, and healing.