Domestic geopolitics and land issues: contradictories representations over land in Vietnamese metropolitan areas rivalries - Fanchette, Sylvie
This presentation aims to analyse land rivalries in the metropolitan area of Hanoi and the nature of the villagers’ strategies: between resistance and resignation, the opportunities are numerous. Using several cases studied in some periurban villages, the author aims to demonstrate the ambivalence of the central state role, who tends to have a remote and indirect role in such conflicts, overseeing the general policy and regulatory settings, and the role of local authorities (Province, district and commune level), deeply enmeshed in the micropolitics of land conflicts. It is they who announce and implement projects, oversee land clearances and compensation, adjudicate on disputes and, in many cases, repress expressions of dissatisfaction. The situation is significantly complex with a cast of state actors taking part in land disputes-not always on the same side-including police, army, party members, and representatives of different departments, along with quasi-state actors such as state enterprises, social organizations, retired officials, journalists and intellectuals. We will use the French School of “Domestic” Geopolitic methodology to analyses at several spatial scales the complexity as these land issues. According to Yves Lacoste, geopolitics is the study of “rivalries of powers of more or less large scale, and by relations of forces which are located on the different parts of the concerned territory. In order to understand a geopolitical conflict or rivalry, it is necessary to understand the reasons and the ideas of the main actors—states’ rulers, leaders of regionalist, autonomist, independent movements etc., each translating and influencing the same public opinion he represents. Then role of ideas—even wrong ones—is central in geopolitics, since they explain the projects and determine, as much as material data, the choice of strategies.”
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Keywords: conferencePaper; compulsory expropriations; land issues; metropolisation; rivalries