When Security Is Not Traditional: Rethinking Vietnam's Path to the SDGs
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A study in Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy argues that Vietnam's sustainable development cannot be planned separately from nontraditional security — the pandemics, environmental pressures, and social risks that sit outside the classic military definition of security. Its central claim is that the missing link between the two agendas is itself an obstacle to development.
Context
Security studies have paid growing attention to nontraditional security (NTS) — threats to people and societies that do not come from armies or borders. But that literature has largely stayed on conceptual ground, cataloguing definitions and risks rather than connecting them to the development agenda. Meanwhile, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals have been visibly strained by NTS concerns, the COVID-19 pandemic foremost among them.
Vietnam is a useful case precisely because its development record is strong. Decades of rapid economic growth have not insulated the country from nontraditional sources of insecurity, which raises the question this paper takes up: what happens to a national development strategy when the risks that threaten it are not the ones the strategy was built to handle?
Methods
The article is a conceptual and case-based study rather than an empirical model. The authors review the security and sustainability literatures side by side to identify where the two agendas connect and where they do not, then analyse the main NTS threats facing Vietnam through a set of case studies. The aim is to formulate an integrated approach that treats nontraditional security and sustainable development as one problem rather than two.
Key findings
Sustainability research cannot be sealed off from nontraditional security questions — the paper's core argument is that the two belong in a single frame.
All three pillars of Vietnam's sustainable development — economic, social, and environmental — are shown to be under threat, notwithstanding the country's strong growth record of recent decades.
The absence of integrated linkages between the two agendas is itself an obstacle: nontraditional insecurity is treated here as a serious threat to Vietnam's development prospects, not a peripheral risk.
The policy implication the authors draw is that elements of the human-security agenda should be written into national development policy as nontraditional matters, rather than handled separately.
Keywords:
Nontraditional Security
Sustainable Development
Human Security
Vietnam
Sustainable Development Goals
Integrated Approach
Link:
Citation:
Hoang Dinh Phi, Nguyen Quynh Huy, Nguyen Xuan Ky, Hoang Anh Tuan (2022). Management of nontraditional security for Vietnam's sustainable development: an integrated approach. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 18(1), 696-709.
