The 1954 Geneva Agreements and the Legal Construction of “Temporary Division”: Military Armistice, Sovereignty, and Postcolonial Statehood in Vietnam

Abstract

This article approaches the 1954 Geneva Agreements as a military armistice from a postcolonial perspective. Based on an analysis of the Agreement’s text, the study demonstrates that mechanisms such as the provisional military demarcation line, the demilitarized zone, and military restrictions were constructed consistently with the armistice logic of international law, to end violence and manage the post-conflict transitional period. However, efforts at legal neutralization and non-coercive supervisory mechanisms have revealed significant limitations in the absence of political guarantees and institutional legitimacy within the polarized Cold War context. The paper argues that the 1954 Geneva Agreements constituted a power-based compromise, in which international law functioned both as an instrument of temporary stabilization and as a means of conditioning the space for self-determination of newly independent actors. The prolongation of the “temporary” status did not stem from the content of the legal text, but from the gap between legal design and conditions of implementation. The study contributes to re-centering the debate on Geneva 1954 and offers implications for the design of international conflict governance mechanisms.

https://doi.org/10.26803/MyRes.2026.01