Slow forms of infrastructural violence: The case of Vietnam’s mountainous northern borderlands

Abstract

In Vietnam’s northern mountainous borderlands, ethnic minority Hmong and Yao farmers must constantly negotiate the Vietnamese state’s aspirations to bring these rural communities under greater control. The state is working hard to integrate this territorial periphery, along with its people, land, and resources, while altering local livelihoods to better fit centralised aims and imperatives. These efforts are closely linked to a number of infrastructure programmes. While scholars have contributed important work regarding the wide-ranging impacts of highly visible rural infrastructural projects such as dams and highways, I focus here on three less-well documented state-driven or encouraged projects. These include the implementation of hybrid seed systems, ‘upgrading’ or creating new marketplaces that are both spatially and temporally fixed, and the significant expansion of tourism-sector infrastructure. Drawing on conceptual literature from the infrastructural turn, especially regarding infrastructural violence and infrastructural lives, I examine the impacts these projects have on upland ethnic minority livelihoods. While the Vietnamese state appears to be winning in its quest to territorialise and ‘modernise’ this borderland region, I highlight how minority individuals and households (re)shape specific infrastructural lives with tactics that include subtly disrupting or resisting such state-supported initiatives. I make the case that more attention needs to be paid to infrastructure projects that might be only barely perceptible, but that are nonetheless perpetuating slow forms of infrastructural violence across the Southeast Asian Massif.