This essay explores the contestatory nature of land disputes in rural Vietnam. It builds on the findings of the research essays in this special issue and on recent scholarship to identify what is politically significant about contemporary land conflicts. Rural land disputes implicate a multiplicity of state, quasi-state and non-state actors in public, sometimes violent, contestations over the values attached to land. Their overt, discursive and contentious characteristics, the complex dynamics of protest and dispute mediation, and the manner by which disputants engage and disengage from their state representatives are identified as important dimensions of rural land politics in modern Vietnam.

This paper describes the protracted struggles by ethnic Khmers in An Giang Province to regain farmland taken from them by ethnic Vietnamese migrants during their forced absence from the Vietnam-Cambodian border during and after the Third Indochina War. Efforts by the original landowners to organize collectively to seek justice from national authorities were stifled by local officials motivated to preserve the new status quo and were ideologically delegitimized by members of the rural middle class. The findings shed new light on ethnic minority political agency and show how the Vietnamese state is drawn materially and discursively into conflicts between competing social groups.

Reviewing the scholarship on ethnic minorities in Vietnam, this essay identifies problems with the prevailing "carceral" approach that regards ethnic minorities as deprived of agency and as territorially circumscribed, disciplined subjects. New ethnographic and historical research demonstrates, to the contrary, that ethnic minorities have been active in the transformations of their worlds. The new scholarship situates contemporary minority transnational networks in the context of older translocal affiliations, identities, and livelihood strategies. The enduring anthropological preoccupation with official classificatory projects is questioned; instead, attention is given to popular identifications in circulation, and transition, among ethnic minorities and their proximate Others.

Examining recent momentous changes in rural Vietnam, this article contends that many rural development policies implemented by the state and international development agencies adopt criteria of progress that are inappropriate to the situation and needs of rural people. However, far from being left entirely bereft by the failures of official development schemes, rural people in Vietnam have access to an alternative set of resources and strategies to improve their lives. Using examples from the Mekong Delta, the article demonstrates that these resources and strategies help rural people realize a quality of life that is engaged, modern, and viable.