Introduction: The Spatial Politics of Marketplaces

This essay provides an overview of how development ideologies catalyze diverse displacement and resettlement dynamics among market traders in Vietnam. Case studies presented by authors in this section analyze the kinds of policies and practices that structure market space and the different ways that traders themselves engage the efforts of bureaucrats and state authorities to transform them into malleable citizens. The ethnic identities of traders, their sociopolitical networks, knowledge of complex temporal cycles of trade and spatial mobility, as well as the state’s contradictory objectives create margins in which traders resist state control. The effects of scale, biopolitics, and the power of discourse on the part of traders’ ability to pursue more sustained political mobilization constitute significant future research directions.