By Van T. Pham
The debate over independent research in Vietnam is often framed as a question of political openness. Increasingly, it should be viewed as a question of national security. In an era defined by contested maritime claims, gray-zone coercion and great-power rivalry in the South China Sea, governments require accurate and sometimes uncomfortable assessments of strategic reality. If the gap between rhetoric and practice were merely symbolic, it would matter less. But it has direct implications for national security. The coherence problem identified in my earlier research and commentary is not only a question of political principle or fairness. It goes to the quality of strategic knowledge on which national security depends.
A government navigating contested maritime claims, shifting alliance structures, and great-power competition needs the most accurate picture of reality it can obtain. That picture is sharpened, not distorted, by analysis produced outside the official system. Independent researchers have no institutional incentive to tell policymakers what they want to hear. They follow evidence rather than hierarchy. In high-stakes strategic environments, that quality is not a luxury. It is a resource.
The question is sometimes asked whether the same work could simply be done within state-affiliated institutions. To a degree, it can. Vietnam has sought to expand maritime research and communication through state institution settings. But institutional location shapes analytical incentives in ways that matter for the quality of the output. Researchers inside the state institutions often cannot pursue the same questions as independent researchers because they operate within legal and political constraints that make the cost of inconvenient conclusions personally unpredictable.
The record of the past decade is instructive. It has often been independent researchers who first brought inconvenient facts to light about China’s harassment and expanding presence in Vietnam’s EEZ, and who did the hard work of maritime transparency before state institutions, later supported by substantial Western investment in maritime domain awareness, were positioned to build on it. Independent research serves a different function from state expertise, providing a functionally irreplaceable channel of analysis whose credibility depends precisely on its relative distance from the system it is helping to inform.
Foreign-based research has played a valuable role in filling part of the gap that domestic constraints create. Scholars and institutions operating outside Vietnam have produced rigorous work on the South China Sea and on Vietnam’s strategic environment, and that work has reached policymakers and security communities across the Indo-Pacific and beyond. Their contribution is real and should not be understated.
But external research cannot fully substitute for domestic independent analysis. While external researchers can produce technically rigorous work, they cannot match the contextual depth, the local networks, or the years of accumulated credibility that domestic scholars bring. Domestic independent researchers also share the risks of the strategic environment they study. They live with the consequences of maritime crises, economic coercion, or regional instability alongside everyone else in the country. A government that relies primarily on external analysis to understand its own strategic environment has, in effect, outsourced a core function of national security. That is a vulnerability, not a safeguard.
Managed Consensus and Its Limits
The concern that plural voices fragment national consensus misunderstands how durable unity is actually built. Unity sustained by managed information is fragile. It breaks when reality diverges too far from the official narrative, often at precisely the moment when coherence matters most. Unity built on shared understanding of hard facts, including inconvenient ones, is more resilient. Independent research contributes to the second kind. It does not fragment consensus. It stress-tests it against reality before reality does the testing instead.
A Coherence Opportunity
There is a constructive way to read this moment. General Secretary Tô Lâm’s speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue can be understood not only as a statement of Vietnam’s external posture but also as a signal of aspiration, of where the country’s leadership would like to go. Aspirational language, spoken publicly at the highest level before an international audience, can generate its own quiet pressure over time. It creates expectations, establishes standards, and makes reversal more costly.
Vietnam has accumulated significant international goodwill in recent years. Partner governments engage. Multilateral institutions invest. The machinery of regional legitimacy has broadly accepted Vietnam’s self-presentation as a responsible stakeholder. That goodwill is a genuine asset, and it creates space for institutional change that a more isolated or less trusted government could not easily attempt.
At Shangri-La, Tô Lâm called for confidence-building initiatives that link defence establishments, security agencies, maritime law-enforcement bodies, scholars, businesses, and social organisations. The appeal highlighted an important question. In Vietnam’s political vocabulary, “social organisations” typically denotes mass organisations operating within the Party-led system. Whether the framing at Shangri-La was intended to encompass genuinely independent actors remains an open question, and one that the domestic environment does not currently answer in the affirmative. Yet the logic of Tô Lâm’s own speech points in that direction regardless. A confidence-building architecture that links defence establishments, security agencies, scholars, businesses and civil society to build regional trust cannot function on managed knowledge alone. It requires the kind of analysis that is credible precisely because it is not produced inside the system it is meant to inform.
Closing that gap does not require an immediate or wholesale liberalisation. It requires a recognition that independent knowledge is an input to national strategy, not a threat to it. The South China Chronicle Initiative has for more than a decade operated in exactly that space, producing independent, evidence-based analysis on one of Asia’s most contested strategic issues. That work has reached audiences including Vietnamese officials, US officials, experts in EU policy-making circles, and researchers across the Indo-Pacific region. Its experiences demonstrate that the distance between Vietnam’s external posture and its domestic practice is real but not fixed. What is treated as inconvenient today can become indispensable tomorrow, particularly when the international environment rewards intellectual credibility over managed appearance.
The speech at Shangri-La was an important moment for Vietnam’s international standing. If it also signals a broader political ambition, a genuine intent to align domestic institutions with the principles articulated abroad, then the direction forward is clear. The task is not simply to speak the language of trust more persuasively on the world stage. It is to make space for it at home. A regional order built on trust is more credible when the societies proposing it can point to how those principles operate at home: in the space given to independent expertise, in the willingness to let critical analysis circulate, and in the transparent acknowledgement of those who produce it.
That space already has willing occupants. Independent researchers and analysts are ready to contribute, not as critics of the system, but as partners in building the kind of national resilience that the speech itself described. The speech has set the standard. The system now has the opportunity to meet it. For the principles articulated at Shangri-La to carry lasting weight, they will need institutional expression at home.
Van T. Pham is founding director of the South China Sea Chronicle Initiative. This is the second of two commentaries. The first examined the political coherence question raised by Tô Lâm’s Shangri-La address. The author is grateful to Dr. Nguyen Khac Giang and two scholars for their suggestions. All errors are the author’s own.
