A Southern policing perspective and appreciative inquiry: an ethnography of policing in Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Policing knowledge has been dominated by scholarship from the Global North, and largely Western, Anglo-American contexts. Whilst some aspects of Vietnamese society have been exposed to academic and international scrutiny in recent decades, policing norms and structures remain opaque. Exploring why this is the case requires interrogation of the intersections of policing, place and the production of policing knowledge. A Southern perspective on policing has dual aims: firstly, to highlight the dynamics which have hidden, limited or excluded some scholarship on policing, and secondly, to provide a framework to understand how police culture and socialisation occur in different structural environments. This article considers how insights from Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as a mode of inquiry can facilitate undertaking ethnographic research on policing in sensitive and complex political environments, particularly in the global South. It includes my personal reflections on navigating approval of the research, ethics and access to the field. The results of the overarching study found there are more variations in policing practices and cultures than some current assumptions allow because there are a wider range of structural conditions than reported in dominant literature. The research also contributes to scholarship that highlights how police ‘culture’ is not universally a pejorative term and argues that specifically invoking ‘culture’ can form part of an ethnographer’s toolkit. Overall, an ‘appreciative’ approach has potential to contribute to the democratisation of knowledge for a more comprehensive and inclusive account of policing and police culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Appreciative inquiry
• ethnography
• one-party state
• police
• Southern policing
• Vietnam
• gender

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the two reviewers who provided invaluable feedback on an earlier draft. Thanks also to PhD supervisors Professor Janet Chan and Professor David Dixon for guiding this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The front gate to the People’s Police Academy was upgraded in 2017.

2 This article is based on the methodology chapter of my PhD dissertation, but also draws upon other sections to provide insights into the overall research project.

3 The University of New South Wales Law School provided funding for fieldwork. No payments were made to participants or the police force involved in the study.

4 Wahl (2014) expressed similar sentiment in exploring human rights abuses by police in India, viewing some practices as operating according to an ‘alternative morality’ rather than immorality.

5 Article 3 specifies a 10% limit on women in professional police and 15% limit for women in political branches, engineering, logistics and foreign languages. Here, ‘professional police’ can be understood to mean types of police (or security) work that are operational or considered specialist. The research sometimes referred to 15% as the quota limit although it should be recognised that this is an upper limit for women on entry and that different roles and functions may have more or less than this in practice.