Perceived High Costs and Low Benefits in Dissent: How Vietnam Contains Its Digital Youth (2011–25)

Dien Nguyen An Luong

Format: Print Book

ISBN: 9789815361056

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Vietnam’s youth appear politically quiescent despite possessing the same digital capacity, demographic weight and grievances that fuelled major youth-led protest waves across Southeast Asia. This paper argues that Vietnam’s outlier status on this front reflects not apathy but a distinct incentive structure engineered by the state.
A cost-benefit lens best explains this divergence. Vietnam inflates the perceived costs of dissent through calibrated coercion that includes selective punishment, legal ambiguity and socially amplified deterrent signals, while simultaneously dampening the perceived benefits of protest via prosperity narratives, stability messaging and state-curated patriotic channels.
Calibrated coercion has evolved across three phases—signalling, system-building and socialization—to create a high, steady and predictable cost environment that deters mobilization long before collective action can emerge. Uncertainty and control parables magnify these effects, making the risks of dissent feel omnipresent.
Benefit-dampening mechanisms such as performance legitimacy, stability-first narratives and patriotic engagement platforms frame protest as unnecessary, ineffective or even harmful. Selective responsiveness to environmental grievances reinforces the belief that change can occur “within the system”, reducing the perceived payoff of street contention.
Youth behaviour reflects this incentive environment. Vietnamese youth do not mobilize for systemic change; instead, they redirect civic and expressive energy towards culturally vibrant, socially meaningful, but non-contentious activities, such as digital creativity, fandom cultures, volunteerism and information-safe advocacy.
Compared to regional peers, Vietnam occupies a high-cost, low-benefit quadrant in Southeast Asia’s political landscape. Youth in Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia had mobilized when benefits spiked or repression misfired, but neither condition has arisen in Vietnam. The result is a structurally produced equilibrium of political restraint amid cultural dynamism.

This book is on the press and will be available for purchase from 12 February 2026.

Format: PB

Number of Pages: 34

Publication Date: 03/02/2026

Imprint: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute