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Nov 15, 2026
The Everyday Politics of Resources
Lives and Landscapes in Northwest Vietnam
Summary
The uplands of northwest of Vietnam have in recent decades been massively transformed by hydropower schemes, rubber plantations and mining projects. The effects of all on the people and places in this region are, as Nga Dao discusses in this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies on The Everyday Politics of Resources: Lives and Landscapes in Northwest Vietnam, diverse and multilayered. Bringing a political ecology lens to over three decades of accumulated knowledge and fieldwork in the region, Nga describes and interprets the politics of resource extraction to show how the Vietnamese state paradoxically excludes through inclusion; and, how some of its subjects succeed at adapting and thriving in the changed conditions while others fail. She is not starry eyed; the story she tells is precautionary, and the book makes for sobering reading. But it is also celebratory of the everyday cultural politics whose resources upland people draw upon to survive, to be heard, to get redress and sometimes to flourish or prosper.
Nga recommends Extractive Bargains edited by Bowles and Andrews, and Thea Riofrancos’s Extraction.
Like this interview? You might also be interested in Tania Murray Li talking about Plantation Life, or for other episodes on Vietnam, Ben Kerkvliet on Speaking Out in Vietnam and Pamela McElwee on Forests Are Gold.
Neither this interview nor its summary were synthesised by a machine.
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