Legal Pluralism and the Struggle for Customary Law in the Vietnamese Highlands

John Gillespie, Hong Thi Quang Tran

Volume 70, Issue 1, March 2022, Pages 1–42, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/avac024

For centuries, diverse groups of people living in the highlands of Southeast Asia have resisted lowland empires in China, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The interaction between lowlanders and highlanders has been described as “internal colonization”—a process involving the absorption or displacement of highland communities and customary law.