Juvenile Justice Reform and Policy convergence in the New Vietnam

Abstract

This article analyses juvenile justice reform in Vietnam and suggests how this connects with key transformations in wider Vietnamese cultures of control. It offers a grounded investigation of themes raised in recent discussions of policy transfer in the global criminal justice field. It concurs with others that global processes of policy convergence have their local limits, using Vietnamese examples to illustrate where this convergence comes about in practice and where it does not. It explores efforts to professionalize existing community justice practices through a discussion of perceived needs for ‘training’ and for the expansion of ‘counselling’. In doing so, it aims to show how justice practices that might be called ‘neo-welfarist’ are emerging in one of East Asia’s most remarkable political hybrids — the new Vietnam — a communist state that has embraced economic liberalism and, in the process, is creating a new kind of ‘social’ sphere.