ABSTRACT
The People’s Police Force is Vietnam’s national police agency. To date, there is limited scholarship available in English on the nature of policing in Vietnam, especially from the perspective of the officers who comprise the police workforce. This chapter outlines the rationale for studying policing and police culture in Vietnam, draws attention to the dynamics which have hidden, limited or excluded some scholarship on policing in the Global South and in Vietnam, and outlines a framework to understand how police culture and socialisation occur in different structural environments. This chapter details the processes involved in negotiating and undertaking the research and reflects on how insights from Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as a mode of inquiry can facilitate undertaking ethnographic research on policing in sensitive and complex political environments.
