Frontiers of the Republic: Institutionalisation, Ethnic Minority Policies, and Political Contestation in South Vietnam (1955-1975)

The Vietnam War is often framed through binary narratives: a Cold War contest between major powers, a civil war between North and South Vietnam, or a series of domestic political struggles within the two Vietnams. As a result, scholars have seldom examined ethnic minorities and their relationship with the state, for both methodological and historiographical reasons. This research aims to challenge that tendency by placing ethnic minority issues, and their connection to the nation state building project of South Vietnam, at the centre of analysis. It argues that relations between ethnic minorities and the South Vietnamese state cannot be understood simply as a case of repression or assimilation. Instead, these relations were shaped through what I refer to as an institutionalisation process, which grew out of a long historical trajectory of Vietnamese governance over fragmented frontier regions. This included the Central Highlands and the Mekong Delta, the two most strategically significant zones of the Republic of Vietnam. This project is the first study to compare these regions in order to highlight both their policy differences and their points of connection. By doing so, it shows that ethnic minorities were not marginal, but played a central role in the political and administrative development of South Vietnam during the war.