On the Geopolitics of Land Colonization: Order and Disorder on the Frontiers of Vietnam and Indonesia

The author wishes to thank Jean-Philippe Leblond, Bruno Thibert and Pham Thanh Hai, as well as the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for its support to the project entitled “The Challenges of the Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia”. “The state is panoptic. It likes to see those that it likes and even more those who do not like him. The state likes to mark out the land and regroup people.”(Translated from Brunet 1990: 63.) A Question of Territory Geopolitics Although...