ABSTRACT
There are many challenges to security in Vietnam, including the existing territorial disputes, natural disasters, environmental and climate change challenges, and economic fragility. Many challenges to human security, including public health, food safety, unregulated migration and trafficking in persons, affect the Vietnamese people on an everyday basis. Vietnam has made significant progress in poverty reduction and achieving the aim of other Millennium Development Goals in the last three decades. From one of the poorest countries in the world in the 1980s, the Vietnamese economy has managed to sustain annual national economic growth at 5–7 per cent. It managed to reduce poverty from 70 per cent in the mid-1980s to 58 per cent in 1993, and down to 14.2 per cent in 2010 (Molisa, 2009; World Bank, 2012). 3 The ‘Doi Moi’ (renovation) policies brought economic and social empowerment, participation in economic activities, political life, mobility, internationalisation and access to international conventions.
