Land from the Tiller: The Politics of “Land Recovery” in Vietnam

In April 2012, three-thousand-plus members of local security forces were deployed to disperse around a thousand villagers who had occupied a construction site slated for a large urban development in the Van Giang district of Vietnam’s northern province of Hung Yen. The occupation of the site—a slab of concrete covering the land they once farmed—was a final display of defiance by villagers who had for years been protesting the local government’s decision to seize five hundred hectares of their farmland to make way for an “eco-urban township” otherwise known as “Ecopark” (B. N. Dang 2015). The brutal crackdown