Flexible and compassionate, or violent and intimidating?: various accounts of law in Vietnam

Abstract

This paper provides a bottom-up analysis of law in daily life in Vietnam through an empirical study of low-income residents’ engagement in illegal housing activities in a peri-urban area of Ho Chi Minh City. Different from most existing studies of law and social change which take the formal institutional framework of law as their starting point, this paper examines the uses and meanings of law as products of interactions between citizens, local authorities, and intermediary actors. From an in-depth analysis of the residents’ stories, it argues that the role of law within daily life in Vietnam must be understood through the enactment of two opposing, but mutually connected, forms of legality. One form emphasizes informality and sentiment, while the other emphasizes violence and intimidation. The former accommodates and answers to people’s survival needs, while the latter constrains if not suppresses those needs. These forms of legality are mutually connected because they unfold in an ambiguous area of law enforcement that is largely subject to local authorities’ arbitrary discretion. These findings allow for a conceptualization of everyday legality in which law is both manipulable and emancipatory, but also disadvantageous and sanctioning.