Vietnamese foreign policy

Regarding the operational specifics of death penalty policy, Professors Johnson and Zimring have argued that it is extreme left or right wing authoritarian states’ aversion to a limitation of their own powers that determines high rates of executions in countries such as Vietnam, Singapore, China and North Korea as opposed to other, less-punitive Asian nations which share similar cultural and religious characteristics.  For a regime like Vietnam’s, the swift carrying out of a death sentence, especially when performed in public, serves to highlight the state’s power over life and death and enhance political control over the domestic constituency.  At first glance then, little scope for the exercise of the clemency power as a form of lenient reprieve from the death sentence by the executive government appears possible under a repressive regime of this nature.

However, unlike China and Singapore, a notable feature of Vietnam’s death penalty practice since the Doi Moi reforms of 1986 has been the executive’s willingness to reprieve a large minority of prisoners sentenced to death through Presidential clemency, even though executions themselves have continued unabated.  What official and unofficial justifications have been given for grants of Presidential clemency in Vietnam, and relatedly, what structural and cultural factors explain the use of clemency in a noticeable proportion of death penalty cases?  These are the under-researched questions I provide plausible explanations for in this article, incorporating an empirical study of Vietnam’s death penalty clemency grants since the mid-1980s, interpreted through the lens of the relevant academic literature on clemency and pardon grants.

After the end of the Vietnam War, both the Vietnamese and American governments wanted to normalize relations, and yet they failed to do so until 1995. Why was this the case? This paper focuses on the missed chance for normalization of relations between 1975-79. I argue that domestic economic imperatives rather than pride was the primary driver of Vietnam's insistence on postwar reparations. By the time the Chinese-Khmer Rouge threat had driven Vietnamese leaders to drop this condition, American leaders sought to prioritize normalization of relations with Beijing first. I argue that this decision was taken mainly at National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's own initiative to counterbalance Soviet and Cuban activities in Africa rather than due to Chinese pressure, and that the Carter Administration did not conclusively shelve normalization plans with Vietnam until the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia.

In my undergraduate dissertation I looked at the causes of this conflict, concluding that it was misperception on all sides that was responsible for escalating border clashes. The Khmer Rouge irrationally feared a Vietnamese attempt to swallow up their nation and conducted cross-border raids into southern Vietnam. The Chinese accused Vietnam of mistreating its Chinese minority, became locked in territorial disputes with Vietnam, and grew increasingly alarmed by what they believed to be growing Soviet influence on Vietnamese foreign policy. And the Vietnamese were convinced that China had orchestrated its refugee crisis and were behind the Khmer Rouge attacks, with a two-pronged invasion on the horizon. These misperceptions ultimately convinced Vietnam to conduct a preemptive strike against the Khmer Rouge.

This summer, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PAC) held the first oral hearings in the case brought by the Philippines against China concerning the South China Sea. Before considering any substantive issues, the PAC has to decide whether it has jurisdiction to issue a ruling. Earlier, the closing weeks of 2014 had seen three significant developments, with Hanoi making a submission to the PAC, Beijing publishing a position paper (while not submitting it to the Court), and the United States issuing a position paper of its own. We can also mention the continued interest in the South China Sea by other countries, including India and Russia. Taken together, it means that the time may have arrived to take stock of the arbitration case, updating our previous summer of 2013 piece “Manila,
Beijing, and UNCLOS: A Test Case?". At stake is not only this arbitration case, or even the entire South China Sea, but the role of international law in contributing to peaceful solutions to territorial conflicts, specifically whether it can help accommodate changes in relative power without
recourse to military conflict.

... and the Greater Mekong Subregion, it argues that the country's strategies do not incorporate ideas of a common good as they are enshrined in the principle of human security.1 In relation to water, human security issues in ... 2008 by the Regents of the University of California. ...

Over the last 26 years, Vietnam’s Communist Party-ruled state has evolved into a rent-seeking state whose ethos is to create barriers and extract rents from society rather than to transform society into a one that is imbued with socialist values (the classical communist state) or to facilitate rapid economic growth (the developmental state). The year 2012 marked a dramatic milestone on the road of this rent-seeking state towards a crisis. The chapter chronicles the year’s most important events and spotlights the key dynamics of Vietnam’s economy, politics, and foreign relations. It argues that a key feature of Vietnam’s domestic politics was the clash between group led by VCP General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung respectively. It also discusses the major dilemmas facing Vietnam’s, foreign policy.

For some time in the shadow of other regional powers' forces and the other branches of the Vietnamese military, the Vietnamese Peoples' Navy (VPN) is going through a period of modernisation and expansion. Having not played a major role in Vietnamese geostrategy in the twenty-first century, increasing questions over control of sea routes in the South China Sea and competing forces within South-East Asia have necessitated the consolidation of the VPN.

This thesis is about French foreign policy and how it has been constrained or enabled by the European Union (EU). It applies "Europeanization" theory to French policy in East Asia, testing the extent to which three dimensions of the Europeanization process (policy convergence, national projection and identity reconstruction) are evident and mutually compatible. The extent to which EU membership and the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) make a difference to French policy and vice versa, is evaluated over the period covering the second term of President Francois Mitterrand (1988-95) and the first term of President Jacques Chirac (1995-2002). France is a core country in the European Union and has taken part in European foreign policy (EFP) projects since the founding of European Political Cooperation in 1973. At the same time, its foreign policy is distinguished by a tradition of national independence and power projection. This thesis studies the interaction of French national policy with collective European foreign policy (EFP), and French interaction with the preferences, statements and actions of the Commission, the Council, the Member States and the European Parliament concerning East Asia. Most studies argue that if there is any "Europeanization" taking place, it is limited only to the bottom-up national projection variant that seeks to amplify French policies as "European", ie. to "Gallicise" European foreign policy. This study examines the record of French and EU interactions with China, Japan and Vietnam in the areas of economic exchanges, political-security relations and human rights to establish if there has been a trend of converging "European" policies and collective European conceptions of interest and identity. It concludes that the utility and impact of EU institutions and the CFSP on French foreign policy behaviour is more significant than is commonly imagined or admitted, and that the foreign policies of EU member states tend over the long term towards convergence.

Up to now, Vietnam and Australia have had a 47-year diplomatic relationship. In particular, with the goal of becoming a middle power, keeping the order of world fields led by the West, Australia wishes to tighten cooperation systems with Vietnam. Through Vietnam, Australia can strengthen the test of China's concentrated power, tightening the system with countries in the region containing the interests of Australia's core. The article focuses on analyzing the main features of the political, economic, educational - scientific and technical systems between Vietnam and Australia in the second decade of the 21st century.