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Abstract
The human geography of Vietnam’s upland area has been transformed significantly during the last 40 years due to the increasing control from the central government. We argue that State territorialisation, understood as a strategy of State-making and assertion of the State’s authority, has the tendency to marginalise, socially and politically, local ethnic minority peoples by excluding them from indigenous social and economic geography and the use of natural resources. At the receiving end of these official policies, the local ethnic minority people do not passively accept their marginalisation but are able to initiate the use of traditional cross-border cultural resources to improve their condition. By analysing the tolerance from local official towards illicit cross-border activities daily carried out by local people, the case study provides some insights on the dynamics of power struggle between the State and local people. We concluded that local ethnic minority peoples actively re-negotiate with more powerful State and economic actors and re-shape local border politics while the State is not always uncompromising and monolithic as it is usually portrayed.
Highlights
Electronic reference Trinh Nguyen Minh Anh, Doo-Chul Kim and Fumikazu Ubukata, « Negotiating the State-making in Vietnam borderland – Case study of an ethnic minority group in Central Vietnam », Belgeo [Online], 4 | 2016, Online since 31 December 2016, connection on 30 April 2019
Apart from a small population engaged in trading with lowlanders, most tribal peoples in the mountainous west of Quang Tri Province preferred to keep a social distance from Vietnamese migrants
Several French colonialists set up coffee plantation on the basalt soil in Khe Sanh valley they did not come into close contact with local Bru-Van Kieu people because they all preferred to bring Kinh lowlanders to work as plantation cullies (Le et al, 1993)
Summary
Electronic reference Trinh Nguyen Minh Anh, Doo-Chul Kim and Fumikazu Ubukata, « Negotiating the State-making in Vietnam borderland – Case study of an ethnic minority group in Central Vietnam », Belgeo [Online], 4 | 2016, Online since 31 December 2016, connection on 30 April 2019. The physical transformation in living environments of the Bru-Van Kieu people is not an exception within contemporary Vietnamese society, where the nationState project is characterised by efforts of a postcolonial socialist State to increase its penetration into, and control over, the population and territory in its previously remote frontiers. This process, has paid little regard to the pre-existing socio-economic conditions of the indigenous people and has mainly imposed external institutions on them (Michaud and Forsyth, 2010). Several French colonialists set up coffee plantation on the basalt soil in Khe Sanh valley they did not come into close contact with local Bru-Van Kieu people because they all preferred to bring Kinh lowlanders to work as plantation cullies (Le et al, 1993). When Vietnamese nationalists found a footing in western forested mountains to mount their resistance against the French, inviting retaliation from the latter and together increasing hostility in the area, most Bru-Van Kieu apart from those residing in Khe Sanh opted to escape into deeper forest and mountains where they felt safe to avoid conflict (Le et al, 1993)
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