The legal ideologies of cyber regulation in Vietnam

Abstract

In May 2018, the National Assembly of Vietnam proposed a Cybersecurity Law at its fifth meeting that was met with intense opposition from a wide range of social groups. The remarkable event of opposition has raised scholarly interests. Yet, no studies thus far had examined this extraordinary social phenomenon of law in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The socio-legal inquiry of this paper analyses how different social organisations in contemporary Vietnam precipitated this event of nation-wide oppositions. The discourse analysis revealed that the event of opposition was the clashing of different legal ideologies embodied by four social groups in the contemporary Vietnamese society. The paper contends that thinking about new laws and regulation in contemporary Vietnam has evolved from pre-existing normative and ideological contexts. The dominant legal ideologies such as Confucianism and Party paramountcy proved resiliency in new social conditions. However, neoliberalism and liberalism have made their way into Vietnamese regulatory thinking through two social organisations that are gaining more regulatory power. These findings suggest that legal ideologies play a key role in the formulation of cyber regulation.

Keywords: Cybersecurity Law, Cyber regulation, Contemporary Vietnam, Systems theory, Functional Differentiation, Social organisation