Paper short abstract:

Dr Seb Rumsby is an early career scholar based at University of Warwick’s department for Politics and International Studies. Having completed his PhD thesis on the intersections of religious transformation, ethnic politics and marketisation in Vietnam’s highlands,

Paper long abstract:

Researching Christian conversion and grassroots development among the ethnic Hmong, who sit at the bottom of Vietnam’s ethnic hierarchy, involves complex questions about history, power relations and positionality. While Vietnam as a whole was subject to French imperialism for decades which has profoundly shaped its communist-party-led independence, Vietnam’s minority highlanders have undergone a further ‘internal colonisation’ in the form of state territorialisation, mass (ethnic majority) lowlander immigration and dispossession of land. What’s more, Vietnam’s government has opposed and treated Christian conversion among ethnic minorities with suspicion as a potential ‘neo-imperial’ plot by external enemies to undermine the socialist authorities. This experience of ‘double colonisation’ leads to surprising dynamics whereby it might be easier for a Western outsider to gain the trust of Hmong research participants than state-aligned local Vietnamese researchers. On the other hand, political critique of state oppression and structural ethnic discrimination among Hmong Christians tends to uncritically align with right-wing evangelical discourses about the evils of communism and the need for Vietnam to follow Christian-capitalist economies like USA and South Korea. How, then, do we decolonise in two seemingly opposite directions – pushing back on both Vietnamese ethnic chauvinism and the idea of free-market development which is ultimately rooted in neo-colonial Western power relations?