Conflicted Citizenship in Vietnam: Between Grassroots Mobilization and State Repression

Does ‘citizenship’ exist in a socialist or communist context? If it does, what would this mean in the case of Vietnam? To what extent do the Vietnamese state and Vietnamese citizens perceive citizenship differently? And how are those differences negotiated? Why does the wave of recent popular protests in neighbouring countries concern the Vietnamese government? Two lecturers from the University of Passau, Mirjam Le and Franziska Nicolaisen, share and discuss with Linh Phương Lê their findings on these issues.

Mirjam Le is a lecturer and PhD researcher in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Passau, Germany. Her thesis focuses on small town urbanization and the production of urban space in Vietnam. Her research interests involve urbanization and state-society relations in Vietnam, especially processes of self-organization and citizenship.

Franziska S. Nicolaisen is a lecturer and research assistant for the chair of Development Economics at the University of Passau in Germany. Her work focuses on sustainable urban mobility in Vietnam. Other research interests include heritage tourism, health governance and social movements in the context of Southeast Asia.

This episode is a discussion of their chapter of the same title, published in Vietnam at the Vanguard: New Perspectives Across Time, Space, and Community, edited by Jamie Gillen, Liam Kelley and Phan Le Ha (Springer 2021).

Linh Phương Lê is a PhD Researcher at the Institute for Media Studies, KU Leuven University in Belgium. Her work explores the media representation of Vietnamese female migrants to China and Taiwan. A former NIAS-SUPRA scholarship receiver, Linh’s regional focus is on Vietnam and East Asia.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

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