Presentation Schedule
Silenced Voices: Ethnic Identity, Resistance, and Cultural Politics in Vietnam’s Highlands (111209)
Session Chair: James W.Y. Wang
Tuesday, 10 November 2026 12:35
Session: Session 1
Room: Room G (4F)
Presentation Type:Symposium Presentation
Economic reforms and large-scale development in Vietnam have fundamentally reshaped state–minority relations, particularly in the Northern and Central Highlands. Resource extraction, hydropower construction, and state-directed population resettlement have intensified social inequality and placed mounting pressure on ethnic minority communities and their traditional livelihoods. Drawing on fieldwork conducted across highland communities since 2023—including in-depth interviews with community members, local officials, and religious leaders, as well as document analysis of state and community records—and employing comparative case analysis, this paper examines how minority groups respond through resistance, adaptation, and cultural self-assertion. Particular attention is given to the 2001–2004 Montagnard protests in the Central Highlands and the 2011 Hmong millenarian movement in the Northwest Highlands. These events are approached not as security incidents but as expressions of cultural identity, historical memory, and lived marginalization. Engaging James Scott's concept of "weapons of the weak," the paper argues that highland communities deploy both everyday practices and collective mobilization to contest state integration and preserve cultural autonomy—revealing that identity, rather than political opposition alone, constitutes the primary register of minority resistance. Paradoxically, the very integration policies designed to absorb minorities into national development appear to deepen their attachment to tradition and place. Cultural politics—not security discourse—thus offers the more revealing framework for understanding highland resistance in postsocialist Vietnam, with implications for scholarship on ethnicity, identity, and state–minority relations.
Authors:
James W.Y. Wang, National Chi Nan University, Taiwan
About the Presenter(s)
Professor James W.Y. Wang is a University Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at Head of Department in Taiwan
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