How does market-induced internal migration affect state building? I argue that market-led internal migration can help the state expand its physical presence in minority-concentrated peripheral areas, but it can also hurt the state's ability to induce compliance from minority populations. This is especially true where migrants and natives compete over ownership of limited, valuable land. I leverage an exogenous positive shock in global coffee prices in the mid-1990s that drove an influx of ethnic majority migrants into minority-concentrated areas in Vietnam. My preliminary evidence suggests the Vietnamese state was able to expand its bureaucratic and infrastructural capacity (especially those related to education) in affected areas, though the adverse effects on minority compliance in the long run are inconclusive. State building can occur at times without being induced by warfare or internal conflict, and even without the direct supervision of the state.

How do authoritarian states strategically recruit and deploy street-level bureaucrats in peripheral areas to strengthen information capacity? Despite limited state presence, the Vietnamese Party-state maintains a surprisingly high level of information capacity in the mountainous periphery, home to diverse ethnic minority populations. I argue that a key mechanism behind this remarkable capacity is the strategic use of public-school teachers as frontline state-building agents. In areas with limited state presence, teachers function as multipurpose brokers: they facilitate citizens’ access to the state via providing information, persuade local buy-in to state initiatives, monitor compliance, and intervene upon early signs of noncompliance. Using evidence from an original survey of teachers in three minority-concentrated provinces in Vietnam, I hope to show that teachers stationed in areas with less state presence voluntarily engage more intensively in day-to-day state-building tasks than their counterparts elsewhere. Further, I argue that this compliance is partly the product of selection: teachers who are placed in areas with less state presence are less competent, more loyal, and less embedded in the local communities on average, than teachers in areas with more state presence. These features make them especially likely to act as reliable agents of state-building, even if they do not perceive themselves as such. My article hopes to extend the literature on the role of mass education in building the state, by clarifying the channels through which teachers extend state reach and authority in strategic, hard-to-govern peripheries.

For central rulers seeking to consolidate legitimacy among the mass, education can be a useful tool. The dissemination and teaching of state-sanctioned textbooks in schools across the country can help to spread ideas about the state and the legitimacy of its rulers. In Vietnam, this construction of the nation-state comes hand in hand with the Communist Party’s quest to legitimize its enduring grasp onto power. This paper dissects the content of Vietnamese national identity as portrayed in general education textbooks. Through a text analysis of over 400 state-sanctioned social science and humanities textbooks for grades 1-12 spanning the country’s post-colonial period (1957-2018), I explore how the components of Vietnamese national identity have shifted over time to serve state building and regime legitimation purpose.