Platformization, Citizenship, and Statecraft in Vietnam: A Three-Body Problem
Engaging with contemporary debates about political subjectivities in the platform age, this talk reconceptualizes digital platforms as context-dependent social infrastructures, despite their algorithmically governed management.
As a single-party communist state within the Global South characterized by a substantial informal labour sector, Vietnam reframes the platformization of urban services and governance, providing a valuable "worlding-provincializing" perspective (Burns et al., 2021). Moving beyond a telescoped gaze upon digital management under authoritarian regimes, this lecture proposes a fine-grained study of the embeddedness of digital platforms within a less-explored context to challenge prevailing global narratives.
The talk develops this argument by investigating the reorganization of the informal motorbike taxi sector in Vietnam since the stunning arrival of the international Grab app into the local market in 2014. Drawing from extensive participatory fieldwork with Grab motorbike taxi drivers in Ho Chi Minh City, the talk contends that the emergence of the platform economy has resulted in a ‘three-body problem’ in the Vietnamese urban power relationships: by entering the game, international private apps disrupted the historical bilateral relationship between the Vietnamese state and its informal small entrepreneurs.
This disruption has paradoxically fostered unforeseen interstices of negotiation among a newly configured triad of actors, leading to the manifestation of unprecedented political subjectivities within the urban Vietnamese context. In this way, platformization introduces new dimensions to the challenges associated with the performative practices of citizenship and statecraft in contemporary Vietnam. Furthermore, a critical examination of platformization offers unique insights into the everyday dynamics that shape the complexity of authoritarian power, aligning with Özgün Erdener Topak’s concept of "authoritarian assemblage."
Speaker & chair bios
Prof. Marie Gibert-Flutre is Professor of Geography at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France). Her current research deals with the digitalization of everyday urban life in East Asia and Southeast Asia. In continuation of her previous work, by critically exploring ‘global Asia’ from ordinary public spaces and neighbourhoods, she turns in particular the traditional approach to ‘global cities’ upside down and contributes to a renewed conception of digitalization as a highly situated process, where forces at play locally are both intertwined and labile.
As Principal Investigator, she manages the Ho Chi Minh City case study of the International SEANNET (Southeast Asia Neighbourhoods Network) research programme (funded by the Henry Luce Foundation – 2022-2026). She was also the PI of the DiverCities Project (Governing Urban Diversity in Europe and Asia) co-funded by NUS and University Paris Cité (2021-2022).
She has notably published Les envers de la métropolisation: Les ruelles de Ho Chi Minh Ville (Vietnam) (CNRS Edition, 2019); Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), co-edited with Heide Imai; "Rhythmanalysis: Rethinking the Politics of Everyday Negotiations in Ordinary Public Spaces", Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2022, vol. 40, n° 1; "How Does the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ Change Urbanisation Patterns in Southeast Asia?," Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 2023, vol. 65, n° 1 (co-authored with an ANR-funded project); and "When the ‘Inclusive Turn’ Fuels the Entrepreneurial City: Critical Perspectives from Singapore", Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 2025, vol. 66, co-authored with Sarah Cosatto.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
*Banner photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
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