Platform Work, Informality, and Statecraft in Vietnam: A Three-Body Problem

While the political dimension of informality is well established in critical scholarship, it is often overlooked in analyses of how platformization reshapes the formal-informal divide. As a result, debates on platform work in informal economies tend to emphasize economic and regulatory outcomes, narrowing the analytical scope of the issues at stake. This article approaches platform work not only as a labor arrangement but as a site of political subject formation and contested legitimacy. It revisits the notion of “platformalization”—commonly used to describe the formalizing effects attributed to platform work in the Global South—and examines how digital platform workers develop political capacities and claims-making practices vis-à-vis both state institutions and platform authorities. The argument draws on long-term participatory fieldwork with Grab motorbike drivers in Vietnam, a context marked by a high rate of informal labor and an authoritarian regime. I introduce the concept of a “three-body problem” to theorize how platformization reconfigures urban power relations. The entry of platform intermediaries destabilizes the historically bilateral relationship between the state and informal workers, generating a triangular arena of negotiation among workers, platforms, and public authorities. This configuration produces new forms of mediation, contestation, and recognition that reshape the performative practices of citizenship and statecraft in contemporary Vietnam. This article thus makes two contributions: first, it advances a political theory of platform-driven formalization centered on subjectivation, legitimacy, and claims-making; second, it proposes a triangular analytical framework for understanding platform power that moves beyond state-market binaries. Together, these contributions reposition platformization as a transformation of political relations as much as of labor regimes in the Global South.