The Mixed Blessings of National Integration: New Perspectives on Development in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands

The ethnic minorities of Southeast Asia’s uplands, including those of Vietnam, tend to be portrayed as excluded from national society and locked into poverty, environmental degradation and positions of subjugation. Recent debates about Southeast Asian uplands-lowlands relations have questioned this discourse by highlighting the diversity of experiences, the agency of ethnic minority groups, and uplanders’ strategies of state evasion. This article finds that the integration of the uplands into the Vietnamese polity should be understood as an ongoing struggle between nation-building and state expansion characterised by grand visions on the one hand, and incomplete policy implementation and uplanders’ ambiguous stance towards integration on the other.     

“Extremely Rightful” Resistance: Land Appropriation and Rural Agitation in Contemporary Vietnam

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, this article explores a rural protest against the appropriation of arable land for a development project. The focus is on villagers’ collective memories of an exceptional protest staged in 2010. The aim of the protest was to pressure local district authorities to increase the compensation villagers agreed to take three years earlier. While originally accepting compensation when their holdings were appropriated to build an industrial park, they later considered that the compensation paid was unfair and that some funds were misappropriated. They were aware that the likelihood of getting additional compensation was small and the risk of repression high. In tracing their struggle, the article argues that villagers did not seek to retain land as their primary subsistence source or as cherished ancestral land. Neither were they driven by an abstract sense of justice. Rather, they represented themselves as active, responsible decision-makers, determined to risk their own safety to bring their family a better future. They therefore employed an “extremely rightful” form of resistance rarely documented in the scholarship on Asia. They not only confined actions within officially sanctioned channels, but also underplayed all oppositional intentions against central and local authorities.     

Understanding Life in the Ottoman–Montenegrin Borderlands of Northern Albania during the Tanzimat Era: Catholic Mirdite Tribes,Missionaries and Ottoman Officials

The paper reconsiders the development of decentralization/centralization dynamics during the Ottoman Empire, focusing on the Ottoman–Montenegrin borderlands of Northern Albania with particular reference to the Mirdite territory inhabited by Catholic tribes. First, the paper describes the local socio-political system and balance of power in Mirdite territory before the enactment of the Gulhane decree. Secondly, the paper focuses on the developments and changes occurring in this land during the Tanzimat. Interaction, intertwining and overlapping between different strategies and policies are analysed in regard to the relationship between Catholic tribes, missionaries and Ottoman officials. Because of them, the changes and developments in the local administrative system occurring in both the religious and the political dimensions during the last part of the nineteenth century were expressions of the process of decentralization/centralization triggered by Istanbul from the third decade of the nineteenth century on.     

Inside the Karen Insurgency: Explaining Conflict and Conciliation in Myanmar’s Changing Borderlands

Since 2012 Myanmar’s oldest ethnic rebel group, the Karen National Union (KNU), has sought for considerable rapprochement with the government. To many, this seemed to be the direct outcome of wider political transition in Myanmar. This article proposes an alternative explanation. Based on extensive field research and an emerging literature on armed groups, it demonstrates that the group’s rapprochement with the government was driven by leadership struggles between two rival factions within the KNU. At the core of this contestation are shifting internal power relations, which resulted from military pressures and geopolitical transformations in the Myanmar-Thai borderlands. These findings point to significant shortcomings of Myanmar’s peace process. They also contribute to the field of Conflict and Security Studies with much needed primary source data on the internal politics of insurgency, which shows how dynamics of civil war are driven by an interplay between forces on different levels of analysis.     

The Development-Insecurity Nexus in China’s Near-Abroad: Rethinking Cross-Border Economic Integration in an Era of State Transformation

Surprisingly, perhaps, China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative expresses a familiar mix of the security–development nexus and liberal interdependence thesis: Chinese leaders expect economic development and integration will stabilise and secure neighbouring states and improve inter-state relations. However, drawing on the record of China’s intensive economic interaction with Myanmar, we argue that the opposite outcome may occur, for two reasons. First, capitalist development is inherently conflict-prone. Second, moreover, China’s cross-border economic relations today are shaped by state transformation – the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of party-state apparatuses. Accordingly, economic relations often emerge not from coherent national strategies, but from the uncoordinated, even contradictory, activities of various state and non-state agencies at multiple scales, which may exacerbate capitalist development’s conflictual aspects and undermine official policy goals. In the Sino-Myanmar case, the lead Chinese actors creating and managing cross-border economic engagements are sub-national agencies and enterprises based in, or operating through, Yunnan province. The rapacious form of development they have pursued has exacerbated insecurity, helped to reignite ethnic conflict in Myanmar’s borderlands, and plunged bilateral relations into crisis. Consequently, the Chinese government has had to change its policy and intervene in Myanmar’s domestic affairs to promote peace negotiations.     

“Children in a Terrible State”: Understandings of Trauma and Child Sexual Assault in 1970s and 1980s Australia*

ABSTRACT

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has shown us the multitude of ways that children were vulnerable to sexual violence. This article explores child sexual abuse outside of institutions, and the development of concepts of trauma in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. From the mid-1970s, there was increased social, medical and legal focus on child abuse. Driven originally by feminists, there was a new interest in the psychological impacts of abuse, including analysis of the grief, despair, fear and anger experienced by survivors. The explosion of interest in child sexual abuse was mainstreamed in the Royal Commission into Human Relationships (1974–1978) and in discussion leading up to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (1989). Across the 1980s, public recognition grew concerning the dangers of sexual violence against children, and, in particular, the increased knowledge and interest in intra-familial assaults. This article will chart the dramatic shifts in public consciousness around sexual abuse, particularly around ideas of harm and trauma. It will also suggest that despite a substantial change in cultural views on sexual assault, improvements for child victims were slow to filter through to the criminal justice system.     

Establishing a Social-Darwinist Mentality in Japan’s Paternalist State: The Potential of Resistance by a Counter-Public

ABSTRACT

From a historical perspective, the welfare net in Japan was established from above without democratic participation and expanded only slowly. This expansion in many cases was aimed at enhancing national cohesion, especially during war time. During the current neoliberal era, Japan’s paternalistic welfare state has been able to put into practice the dismantling of national pension and health-care systems without the need for any theoretical re-orientation. In response, counter-publics have engaged in protest and resistance. By doing so, the victims of modernization and those who are socially weak and disadvantaged in multiple ways are able to regain their self-esteem and personal integrity.     

Driving Development? The Problems and Promises of the Car in Vietnam

The private car comes with promises of modernity and comfortable mobility for the growing middle class in Vietnam. Vietnam’s government has also targeted the domestic automobile industry as a “spearhead industry” in an attempt to achieve industrial upgrading. Paradoxically, the government is simultaneously restraining the market for this industry through imposing high taxes and fees on cars, making them available only to a limited number of people. This article discusses the promises and problems of the automobile in Vietnam. It analyses policies related to the development of the automobile industry, and discusses the reasons for the relative failure of the project. The article argues that the failure is linked to weaknesses in Vietnamese development strategies, but also to the potential problems an expansion in car ownership in Vietnam would lead to. The article contends that the car represents a development dilemma between industrialisation and urban mobility, and that environmental, energy and social concerns add to the rationale for limiting car ownership. Furthermore, although forces promoting car-driven industrialisation appear to be gaining ground, the requirements for regional economic integration may challenge the future of the infant automobile industry.     

The paradox of petrodollar development: Chad’s military diplomacy in regional and global security

This paper examines the Chadian government’s overwhelming preoccupation with state security, rather than individual security, as evidenced by its huge expenditure on arms rather than on poverty-alleviating development projects following the unprecedented influx of petrodollars in the years since production began in 2003. This overemphasis on state security demonstrates a mismatch between the availability of natural resource wealth and ongoing low levels of socioeconomic development in Chad. The country has instead used its enormous oil wealth to boost its standing in the turbulent Central African and Sahelian regions where terrorism is rife. The country’s international diplomacy, which consists of deploying its well-equipped military in international peacekeeping missions and in the fight against terrorism, is a strategy of achieving international recognition while simultaneously diverting the international community’s attention from the country’s democracy deficit and poor human rights record. Internally, authoritarianism and political instability are accompanied by conflict, poverty and underdevelopment, which in turn perpetuate the challenges facing the country.     

Splitting and becoming double in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness

This article explores Zakes Mda’s fascination with and deployment of the (leit)motif of twins, doubles/doppelgängers, and the notion of duality in his novels. In a close reading of The Heart of Redness, I explore how Mda dramatizes the breakdown of Xhosa society during the colonial encounters with the British and their continued impact on the present. I am also interested in the ways in which this novel animates the tensions between colonial modernity and Africanist traditionalism, while also drawing our attention to societies that do not thrive on the fixed taxonomies of rationalism. Through twinship, the figure of the double, and the notion of duality, Mda’s novel not only illustrates the complexity of the South African colonial experience, but also recuperates a historical episode that has been predominantly relegated to the margins of hysteria and delusion.     

Constructing an “Iron” Unity: The Statue of Unity and India’s Nationalist Historiography

In October 2018, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi inaugurated a pet project, the “Statue of Unity”, in Gujarat, India. The world’s tallest statue, the Statue of Unity cost USD416.67 million to construct, and depicts India’s first deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as the “Iron Man of India”, staring resolutely out over the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam. This article examines the meanings of the statue as a political project of memorialisation. We argue that the statue is an attempt to reimagine India’s nationalist historiography around Patel, taking the emphasis off the secular, socialist first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In doing so, the statue constructs a hyper-masculine idea of India centred on an assimilatory idea of “unity”. The statue’s construction materially enforced this symbolism by pushing aside the site’s previous Adivasi owners, and presents an ordered, majoritarian, business-led vision of public space in Modi’s India. Within this space, the statue materialises Patel as the image of Indian identity. He is made from the stuff of progress, concrete and reinforced steel, and coated in bronze, which links his image with India’s long history of religious statue-making. The project then circulates these ideas through tourist marketing and visitor experience.     

Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream and Australia’s “settler transition”

Focusing on radical labour historian Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream (1968), this article reflects on the evolution of Australia’s settler colonial imagination. During a few crucial decades in the nineteenth century, colonial traditions were overcome by settler colonial ones. The former espoused a system where British rulers would paternally manage a colonial environment and all its populations (pastoralists, free settlers, convicts, emancipated convicts, and Indigenous peoples); the latter advocated the establishment of self-reliant agricultural communities of free settlers. In Replenishing the Earth (2009), James Belich distinguished between settler “transition” and settler “revolution”, and emphasised the imaginative elements that underpin and precede the shift to settler self-government. As the global settler transition took hold, locales usually associated with the perception and expectation of degenerative processes were reconfigured as propitious sites for experimenting in sociopolitical regeneration. Following and expanding on Belich’s framework, this article links Australia’s settler transition with its historiography.     

Party,State and the Control of Information in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic: Secrecy,Falsification and Denial

ABSTRACT

Since taking control of Laos in 1975, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party and the government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) have relied heavily on secrecy, denial and information management and control to govern. These tools have been used for presenting the Party and state as united in support of the country’s one-party communist political system and as being the only real political option. This article presents a number of examples of the particular ways the Party and state have done this. The following are discussed: the little-known rift between the “Red Prince” Chao Souphanouvong and Kaysone Phomvihane; conflict between the Lao PDR and Vietnam and China; the anti-Lao PDR insurgency; calls for political change via the “Social Democratic Club” in 1990; unsuccessful student protests for political change in 1999 and 2009; the forced disappearance of Sombath Somphone; and recent attempts to control social media to publicise anti-government viewpoints. Secrecy, falsification and information management and control have important implications, both with regard to conducting research about Laos and in relation to how outsiders tend to analytically frame the study of Party and state.     

The State of China’s Environmental Governance After the 17th Party Congress

To redress its deteriorating environment, Chinese leaders have elevated the environmental agenda in its political discourse, especially at the recent 17th Party Congress. In this article, I answer whether the changes and reforms enacted at the 17th Party Congress and codified in the National Eleventh Five-year Plan for Environmental Protection (PEP) address the flaws of the Chinese environmental governance regime. First I identify the critical shortcomings of China’s environmental governance. Then I examine the PEP, focusing on the reforms that correspond with each of these shortcomings. I find that the PEP reforms are insufficient in addressing the shortcomings of the Chinese environmental governance regime. However, in examining empirical evidence, I find that despite almost non-existent institutional reforms, China’s environmental performance has improved. Finally, in the conclusion, I summarize my findings, examine the implications of the paradoxical increase in environmental performance without corresponding governance reform, and suggest areas of future research.