Vietnam’s public diplomacy: role performance of a hesitant middle power

Abstract

This thesis investigates Vietnam’s contemporary public diplomacy (PD) strategy (2011-2023). By analysing a party-led middle power like Vietnam, the thesis addresses the gap in PD scholarship dominated by democratic and great-power perspectives. Anchoring with a broader concern about the relation between state identity and PD, it also seeks to advance theoretical connections between PD and International Relations through conceptual innovation on middle-power diplomacy.
For these research objectives, the thesis develops a theoretical framework integrating new constructivism, role theory, and status signalling. Through this theoretical lens, PD is conceptualised as role performance to negotiation state identity derived from domestic role conception and international status aspirations. The research employs a qualitative single-case study using thematic analysis of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP)’s documents, 28 semi-structured interviews with PD practitioners and academics, and official press conferences from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The findings show that Vietnam’s hybrid role conception—as both a resilient socialist regime and an aspiring power in international liberal order—produces a PD strategy marked by benignity, neutrality, and ambiguity. These characteristics reflect the VCP’s reciprocal efforts to manage tensions incurred in PD motivations, institutional arrangements, and projected narratives upholding the dual roles. Particularly, with its PD primarily driven by security and domestic development, and orchestrated by a domestic system of propaganda, Vietnam shows intentionally ambiguous status signalling built on benign image and consistent neutral stance. Overall, the dynamics identified in Vietnam’s PD strategy reveal an internal oscillation between ambition for power projection in international system and imperatives of domestic stability and regime legitimacy. This motion in Vietnam’s identity formation prompts a distinctive interpretation of middlepowerhood that the thesis conceptualises as “hesitant middle power.”
This thesis offers one of the first in-depth studies of the domestic making of Vietnam’s PD strategy. Based on the interlink between PD and state identity established by the theoretical framework, the findings of Vietnam’s PD strategy suggest a new trajectory for understanding why and how middle powers perform their identity in the international system.

Date of Award	19 Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Tracey Fallon (Supervisor) & JeongWon Bourdais Park (Supervisor)